Ryan Marcus — It’s all Frank’s fault!

As many of my fellow Linux gamers have noticed, dual screens can be a bitch. Especially with WINE. The solution is actually pretty simple. A package hidden away in the repositories called “devilspie.” This guide will help you set up a full screen game on one of your displays. This is only going to work if the game supports the resolution of one of your monitors. (I.E., my main screen runs at 1680×1050.So does CS:S.)

The issue I am talking about is getting games (in this case WINE games) to run on your main display in fullscreen mode. When I started messing around with this stuff, I had a few goals:

1. To not change any of my dual monitor settings
2. To be able to use my secondary display while in-game
3. To be able to move my mouse from the game onto the secondary display (or to disable that)
4. To be able to double click on a game and have it work  without changing my whole system just to play a game.

A challenge, to be sure, but I found it to be a lot easier then I thought. First things first. Let’s install the devilspie package from the repos.

1. Open System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager.
2. Click on the “Search” toolbar icon.
3. Set the “Look in” popup to “Name”
4. Enter “devilspie”
5. Right click on the “devilspie” package and select “Mark for installation.”
6. Click the green apply toolbar icon.

Now, let’s add the devilspie service to our session, so that devilspie runs whenever we start up our computers. To do this:

1. Open System -> Preferences -> Sessions
2. Click the “Add” button.
3. After your window looks like the one below, click “Ok”
4. Close the Sessions Preferences window.

Next, let’s install the front-end GUI to Devil’s Pie so we don’t have to muck around with config files. To do this, download the .deb file from here. Get the most recent version. I used release three. Once the file is downloaded:

1. Double click the .deb file on your desktop.
2. When GDebi loads, click on “Install.”
3. Once the installation is done, press Alt+F2 and enter: nautilus /usr/share/applications
4. In the new nautilus window, type “gd” whic should bring you fairly close to gDevilspie.
5. You can click and drag this launcher to your panel, your desktop, or your menus (if you open Edit menus.)

Next, we need to setup our WINE game so that Devil’s Pie can deal with it. This is pretty easy. First, open winecfg. If you’ve got a wineprefix setup for your game, you should know how to do this. If not, press Alt+F2 and enter “winecfg”.

1. Click on the “Graphics” tab.
2. Check the box labled “Emulate a virtual desktop” and enter in the size of your main display.

Now that winecfg is closed, we need to know the name of the window it creates for its emulated desktop. The quickest way to do this is:

1. Run winecfg again.
2. Winecfg should open in a large emulated desktop window that fills more then your whole primary monitor. If it does not, repeat the steps above to setup wine in a emulated desktop.
3. Look at the bottom of your screen at the small tabs that represent windows. If you have removed this bar or moved it, I assume you know how to get it back.
4. Look at the tab representing your wine emulated desktop, and take note of its name. Mine was “Default – Wine desktop”

Now its time for the kicker. Set up the Devil’s Pie rule.

1. Open gdevilspie in the way you set up earlier.
2. Click on the “Add” button.
3. Name your rule whatever you want.
4. In the “Matching” tab, check the “window_name” checkbox.
5. In the first field on the left side of the pane, enter the name of the window of your emulated wine desktop.
6. Click on the “Actions” tab.
7. Check the “fullscreen” box.
8. If you move over to raw tab, you should see something like what I have. If you do, click “Save.”
   

   

Now, restart your computer. When you log back in, your WINE virtual desktop will be fullscreen on your main monitor.