Well, after working with the two screen setup for a couple of days, I’ve started to get a terribly sore neck. A bit of self-evaluation shows that when I’m looking at the laptop screen, I’m craning forward and down, which is ruining all the good effort that my chiropractor and the stretching exercises he gave me over the last three weeks have done.
So I’m now running with the laptop screen closed, using the KVM to use the big screen for both laptop and desktop use.
Unfortunately when I came in this morning, my desktop was totally unresponsive. I couldn’t get it to wake up when I switched to it on the KVM, and I couldn’t ssh to it from my laptop. So I power cycled it. That required manually fsck’ing the disk, and then when it did come up for real, the mouse went nuts and started opening programs and moving stuff around on my screen like it was being driven by a demented ghost. It had also booted the wrong kernel (one that didn’t support MVFS). So I booted it with the proper kernel and it was ok. Except that as always, vmplayer complains that I haven’t run /usr/bin/vmware-config.pl, so I ran it again. Don’t know why that never “sticks”.
Get a better laptop stand. I do the same thing, but the dock for the laptop pivots it up so that the laptop screen is at the same level as the external monitor.
Something like this: http://www.dell.com/content/learnmore/learnmore.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~id=hmc_docking_latit&~series=latit&~lt=popup&ref=CFG