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I have dual monitor set up in Ubuntu 11.10. I want to have a single wallpaper spanned across both monitors. How do I do this?

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Might want to note, although nitrogen doesn't appear to change the wallpaper of nvidia machines, it has a cool side effect that still might make it worthwhile. If the changes via nitrogen occur more recently than your changes in the default ubuntu desktop manager, the images will show up in the background of terminals, if their background is set to transparent. So you essentially have a 'hidden' wallpaper. – Kevin Feb 28 at 20:40

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up vote 7 down vote accepted

First you need a wallpaper large enough for both monitors. You can either make one with the gimp or down load one. Alternately you can use a separate image for each monitor.

You can then install a handy little application, nitrogen

sudo apt-get install nitrogen

You then run nitrogen with the path to the directory with your picture(s)

nitrogen ~/Pictures

And select the image. At the bottom of nitrogen, select "automatic" and "Full screen" as options. alternately you can use nitrogen to set a separate image on each screen, up to you (sort of depends on your background images).

nitrogen

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Yep. I got it downloaded and running. However when I press 'Apply' nothing happens. I've got a Nvidia graphics card installed which means use of the Nvidia X Server settings. – MegaBubbletea Dec 21 '11 at 8:30
Odd, nitrogen works with my nvidia card. – bodhi.zazen Dec 21 '11 at 13:14
Restarted PC yet still not working. Even tried using root access. No luck either. – MegaBubbletea Dec 23 '11 at 7:54
Nitrogen works after this tweak: askubuntu.com/a/96979/118 – zengr Nov 27 '12 at 18:17
up vote 6 down vote

Nitrogen answer works, but another tweak is necessary. Run Advanced Settings, go to Desktop section and switch Have file manager handle the desktop off. Then wallpapers set via Nitrogen will be displayed.

However there is strong disadvantage. All icons disappear from the desktop and the context menu can't be invoked. Unless you need icons on desktop this solution may be useful for you.

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Thankyou for your answer. Although that is a good solution I still want my desktop icons. I hope Ubuntu will fully support multiple monitor wallpapers better in future releases. – MegaBubbletea Jan 27 '12 at 6:45
up vote 1 down vote

Take a look at this link: http://www.virtual-nexus-inc.com/news/2011/09/21/ubuntu-11-04-dual-monitor-backgrounds-are-easy-with-shotwell/

you can use shotwell to resize te image as your combined monotors resolution then set it as background using the default image viewer of ubuntu.

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up vote 5 down vote

I do not appear to be able to add a comment to an answer due to my low rep (lolz), so this is meant to be on @topr's answer.

I am the author of Nitrogen and there is code in there to detect a gnome desktop and set it properly so that you don't need to make this change, but it appears to not be functioning on modern Ubuntus. I will investigate.

Issue: https://github.com/l3ib/nitrogen/issues/16

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