Ecne not seeing my HDMI monitor

the way to do it without configuring any files, which can be a good thing, so nothing ever breaks, and you dont have to chroot into your machine to delete your xorg.conf, is to leave one monitor plugged in, and the other monitor unplugged, until after you start your computer, and get into your desktop environment, then you can plug in the dual monitor, and when display settings pop up, you can set your display settings to accomodate it.(or if they dont pop up, then youll have to open them up manually)

different desktop environments are different

so the way this actually works varies, technically speaking, between all of the different desktop environments, and gnulinux operating systems. there's so much variety actually, that it makes the situation very complex.

Mainly, you should only have to configure your xorg settings for a dual monitor setup. Right? But what happens when you want to switch, and just use
one monitor? It's a mega pain. If you're going to stick to one desktop environment you should definitely try to figure out the right way to configure it, otherwise my rudimentary method is easy, and applicable across the gnulinux universe.

If you break your xorg.conf, trying to configure it, and suddenly your boot up process gets stuck trying to load lightdm, or you see a bunch of bizarre systemd messages suddenly, about logind, or whatever the hell, then, if you cant get to a terminal window, to log in, you will have to use a live disk, to chroot your system, delete xorg.conf, and that will fix your system...

LASTLY, if you just so happen to save your dual monitor setup, and create a new xorg.conf file or X11/xorg.conf.d/ file, or whatever, and then attempt to boot up, only to discover your monitor has no output at all(or blank output)! the system defaults to having one or the other be the primary monitor, so, you may have to plug in the other external monitor alone, or at the same time, to fix the problem.

There's a lot of weirdness actually unless youre very familiar with, literally, the entire operating system, and use scenario... all these different systems have their own nuances that are related to the simple task, of getting a second monitor online.

the reason the situation is so bizzare on gnulinux is because it's generally a compilation of disparate, or differing, software projects, as opposed to one cohesive organization.

should my display settings program aquire root priveleges to update xorg.conf?
(and wouldn't that be a violation of the systems security?)

then what happens if the user wants to change those settings, but forgets to invoke the correct display settings? Or changes desktop environments!

If we were all on Ubuntu-linux, using the standard ubuntu install media, and the standard ubuntu desktop environment, for version 24.04, then there would be exactly one definitive answer to your question.

Otherwise you will mainly want to start your question like this...

How do I set up dual monitors on the mate desktop environment for trisquel?

(thats a bad question because most of the search results relate to mainstream stuff(*for a search engine*))

so try again,

How do I set up dual monitors on the xfce desktop environment for debian?(or ubuntu)

or just lookup the archlinux wiki, for the best advice about anything next to gentoo, and lurking fedora users, like this

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page

(use the arch linux wiki search function as opposed to web search to avoid data mining/leveraging)

Thanks for the reply.

Odd thing is that it was working fine. I'm thinking it might have to do with the updating to the current kernel. However, I am not using the linux-libre kernel I just realized.

Ecne kernel info
6.16.1-gnu #1.0 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Sep 27 12:35:59 EST 1983 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I did try your suggestion rebooting with only the HDMI monitor powered up but soon after making the selection for Ecne in the Grub menu HDMI went lights out. Turning on the VGA monitor brought up my login screen and all is well in VGA world.

Preferences > Monitor Settings > only sees the one monitor now.

I have installed Trixie project that andyprough started in the 'troll hole' and it is behaving exactly the same way. I had Bookworm (xfce) earlier and both monitors were fine then. This is soooo much fun. I'm just having too much fun.

Might have to rest up and save some of this fun till later.

On my D8 (with aramo, have not used ecne on it so far), lshw says:

*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GK208B [GeForce GT 710]
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
logical name: /dev/fb0
version: a1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom fb
configuration: depth=32 driver=nouveau latency=0 resolution=2560,1440
resources: irq:45 memory:f8000000-f8ffffff memory:e8000000-efffffff memory:f0000000-f1ffffff ioport:1000(size=128) memory:c0000-dffff

It is also using nouveau but I don't have xserver-xorg-video-nouveau-hwe-18.04 installed. The kernel is 6.8.0-65 as I have linux-generic-hwe-11.0 installed. I also have systemd-hwe-hwdb installed.

I use two monitors, one connected with DVI and one with HDMI, both with 2560x1440 resolution.

I am not sure I understood your situation: when you boot ecne, you have no monitor at all or at least some monitor? If you have some monitor, when you go the hardware settings, for display, is another monitor visible?

I remember having issues of monitors not being detected, then I tried a different way to connect monitors and finally found something working that I was happy with. My monitor connected with DVI is often not detected when connected with HDMI to some other machines. How monitors are detected or not tends to remain a mistery to me, I usually just try many things until I have something working ok. Sometimes, I needed to leave an extra monitor on in order to have another monitor working.

Thanks Avron for reply and info,

'I am not sure I understood your situation: when you boot ecne, you have no monitor at all or at least some monitor?' I saw initial splash screen on my primary HDMI monitor for a moment, then the VGA monitor is connected and the HDMI monitor is disconnected.

'If you have some monitor, when you go the hardware settings, for display, is another monitor visible?' No, it doesn't see any other monitor.

I was playing with Debian on a second hard drive and experienced the exact same problem going from Bookworm to Trixie. Bookworm was fine and I have reinstalled it and am back to the normal two screens.

So I plan on fixing my problem by reinstalling Aramo.