Opened up the AMD Catalyst Contol Center where both my monitors where recognised and configured the “Multi-display desktop with 2 displays” setting and voila we have a dual monitor setup.  Now at this point I started to think this is too easy what is the catch?  The catch as I found out is when you restart the system and all the settings in the AMD Catalyst Control Center revert back to the default of cloned displays.  Bugger!!

Enter stage left my trusty friend Google.  Apparently you have to save the current session for all the settings to be retained.  So on XFCE you go to:

Settings – Settings Manager – Session and Startup

On the Session tab click Save Session.

It took me a while to find this solution so hopefully it will help out someone else.

About the Author

Hi I am Chris Wakefield the owner of ComTech IT Support. I provide Windows and Linux based IT Support, laptop repairs and computer repairs to both business and personal clients in and around Stirling.

For a list of what I can offer you why not visit my website www.comtech247.net where you will find a list of my services, testimonials, blog and much more

I found that there was actually two issues going on at the same time.  The first one was permissions.  I noticed that when Thunar (file manager) was opened as root there was no speed issue but as a normal user it was very slow.  To rectify this I set the ‘group’ permission to read/write and voila it did speed up.  The speed was still a bit slow for my liking so I kept on digging.

The main culprit turned out to be two packages called gvfs-fuse and gvfs-backend.  Gvfs is a userspace virtual filesystem which as it turns out makes Thunar run really slowly.  Remove these two packages and watch your files and folders open significantly faster.

Hope this helps someone with a similar problem.

About the Author

Hi I am Chris Wakefield the owner of ComTech IT Support. I provide Windows and Linux based IT Support, laptop repairs and computer repairs to both business and personal clients in and around Stirling.

For a list of what I can offer you why not visit my website www.comtech247.net where you will find a list of my services, testimonials, blog and much more.