13 March 2013

How to persistently change primary monitor in Linux Mint 14

I have 2 monitors connected, and of course the one i want to have as primary is not used as primary by the computer.

I read around on forums and the only suggestion i found was to use xrand to change primary monitor in a startup script. The problem was that my panels got all messed up by doing this, since the panels got initialized on the smaller screen first, and then changed to the larger screen once my script ran.

The soulution was very simple it turned out. Instead of using xrand, just change which monitor to use as primary in


  • ~/.config/monitors.xml


Find the screen you want to use as primary and change the


  • <primary>no</primary>


to


  • <primary>yes</primary>


No more startup scripts or any other messy things!


Thanks to AlbertP on the Linux Mint forums: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=206&t=104497