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I'm using multiple monitors.

When logged in everything is fine: The left monitor is positioned to the left and the right monitor is positioned to the right, but before I log in, the login-screen positions them the other way around.

This is also the position presented by bios and then the grub menu.

I don't mind where the login is displayed, but when moving the mouse, the boundary is the wrong way around and that's annoying.

Rich.T.
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Nijboer IT
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2 Answers2

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I was experiencing this too. So long as you have your monitors configured as you want them in your user space then you should be able to follow these steps to set your monitors up the same way on the log in screen:

  • Open a terminal
  • Type sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/lightdm/.config/
  • Enter user password
  • Reboot your computer

Kudos goes to this post over here for pointing me in the right direction: Wrong Login Screen Resolution

Community
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jonwitts
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  • Just wanted to say that this also worked for getting the monitor rotation set up correctly for the login screen. Thanks for the solution. +1 – reirab Mar 12 '14 at 19:06
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    Thanks for pointing me in right direction but the same thing can be done with just one command from users home folder: sudo cp .config/monitors.xml /var/lib/lightdm/.config/ – Tanel Mae Mar 14 '14 at 17:26
  • This truly helpful solution!!! – Dmitry May 19 '15 at 07:33
  • On 14.04 this changes the login screen to be the same as one user, but doesn't set the default for all users. – mirams Jun 23 '15 at 09:24
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    I got a permissions error after copying and rebooting, so I needed to sprinkle in some "sudo chown lightdm:lightdm /var/lib/lightdm/.config/monistors.xml". Otherwise, excellent! – Nick Nov 12 '15 at 20:32
  • Thanks for this, very simple and works really nicely +1!! – NaughtySquid Mar 19 '16 at 11:39
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    Along the same lines, I created a link with "sudo ln ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/lightdm/.config/". It does the same thing but has the advantage of being alterable at a future date, without having to re-copy the config file each time the display layout is changed via the "Displays" GUI. – Rich.T. Apr 12 '16 at 16:41
  • Please note that creating a symlink with "ln -s" didn't work as it displayed properly to start with, but keyboard input did not show up and then any attempt to log in caused the screen layout to crash back to a non-configured state. – Rich.T. Apr 12 '16 at 16:54
  • I was looking for a working solution since months. And this was simple and clean. Take my +1! – pixelmitch May 05 '16 at 14:02
  • This doesn't seem to work in 15.10, is there maybe a DPI setting I need to set in monitors.xml? – JacobTheDev May 11 '16 at 02:32
  • This doesn't seem to work on 16.04 either. Has anyone found a working solution or know what changed? – fmoo Jun 10 '16 at 00:24
  • This works about 50% of the time for me in 16.04. Not sure why. – detly Aug 21 '16 at 23:25
  • @detly You could take a look at my new answer and give it a try. – Murphy Dec 19 '16 at 12:16
  • This should be documented – Anwar Apr 01 '17 at 13:34
  • this seems to be working on 18.04 – Amias May 14 '18 at 13:06
  • I do not have "~/.config/monitors.xml", but I am using Xubuntu 20.04. – jarno Dec 21 '21 at 16:40
  • For anyone using GNOME Display Manager (GDM), the command is: sudo cp -f ~/.config/monitors.xml ~gdm/.config/monitors.xml. Confirmed that this works for Ubuntu 22.04. GDM replaced LightDM after Ubuntu 16. Reference: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/gnome-display-manager-gdm-login-screen-monitors-the-wrong-way-around/29967/10 – Zion Nov 25 '22 at 18:39
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At least with Ubuntu 16.04, which includes lightdm-gtk-greeeter 2.0.1, the following entry in /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf can be used to fix the initial position of the login dialog on a certain monitor. This setting isn't available via the settings UI.

[greeter]
active-monitor=0

The monitors.xml workaround didn't work here, too.

Murphy
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