[xmonad] modal window gets placed on unplugged monitor, makes system unusable

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

Lara Michaels <laramichaels1978 at yahoo.com> writes:

> Hello,
>
> I can always reproduce this behavior. I am running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
> and was going to post this as a bug report on gnome-keyring, but now
> suspect I can probably work around this within xmonad.
>
> In short: when using a laptop that will only at times be connected to
> an external monitor but also used "by itself", is there a way to make
> sure that a modal window will always get placed in a currently visible
> part of my desktop area? My problem is that when I boot my laptop by
> itself, a modal window that grabs all input focus (gnome-keyring's
> "please insert passphrase", which often pops up on Ubuntu systems if
> there is a known, encrypted wifi network within range) is getting
> placed in my external monitor which... is not plugged to the computer
> at all. The result is that no elements of the Gnome UI work at all:
> neither the menus on the panel nor (Gnome) keyboard shortcuts to
> launch apps do anything, which makes the system unusable.

This to me sounds like a Gnome/xrandr bug.  It might be possible to work
around this in xmonad, but I'm not sure if there's any functionality
there to be able to do different things depending upon how many monitors
are available.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com