11.04 -- Cannot set my primary display. Applications open on wrong display

[gr1fter]

I just installed 11.04. I have a laptop with an external monitor. I switched to classic mode (gnome) and i have my monitors and taskbars configured the way I want to, however I cannot seem to set a primary display. Every time I open an application it defaults to the Laptop Display and I do not want that.

How can i force my applications to always open on the external display? I did not have this issue on any previous releases.

Please help, Thanks,

[gr1fter]

For those who stumble across this issue, I solved it by going into Compiz Manager and enabling the "Place Window" option.

[DrPotoroo]

I am struggling with the reverse option. I want ALL windows (and notification pop-ups) to appear on my primary display (laptop LCD) and for windows to ONLY output to the external display if I manually put them there after they open. Initially I thought that the compiz place window plugin had fixed my problem, but I am continuing to have problems.

The compiz place window plugin, strangely, doesn't seem to have an option to specify an output to favour - instead outputs can be selected by current application focus or pointer position. That seemed to be okay for my needs, but I am now having the problem that LibreOffice windows are remembering their last position and opening to that instead of respecting the settings I chose for the compiz plugin. Even grabbing LibreOffice windows and adding them to the list of forced managed applications in the place window plugin doesn't achieve anything.

This is a really big problem for me because I use two displays in a situation where I have confidential information open on my primary display and information visible to a client on my external display. It is NOT A GOOD THING when I open a new window that should be for my eyes only and it comes up on my client's display! It is similarly not good when appointment notifications (which may contain confidential information) always pop up on the external display.

Please help me! Thank you!

[DrPotoroo]

I have done some more playing with the compiz place window plugin. It seems that if I add the following rule to both "Force placement windows" under the general tab and "Windows with fixed positions" under the fixed window placement tab then libre office calc and writer documents mostly do what I want:

(class=libreoffice-writer) | class=libreoffice-calc

The exception seems to be that as long as any openoffice document remains open, all other documents that have been opened and closed again will re-open in their last position. I guess that's reasonable, but I would like to be able to over-ride that behaviour.

I'm not sure if any or all of the above compiz settings are actually necessary, but I will keep playing and repost with my results.