Xinerama Question

[Matthew Hawkins]

Brett Worth (brettw at cray.com) wrote:
> What I want to do is run a Xinerama style multiple head environment where
> the X servers are on two different hosts.
> 
> Is this possible?

Anything is possible ;)

> The old motif window manager used to be able to do multiple displays but
> once a client had been started on a screen it couldn't be dragged to the
> other one.

It's not just "the old motif window manager" that supports this, most
window managers today understand multiple screens.  Some even understand
Xinerama (which needs to be handled differently)

The reason you can't drag windows between heads (without using Xinerama)
is that each head is given a unique display id, and a client is only
able to connect once, and to a single display.

Xinerama gets around this by fooling the X server into thinking that the
multiple heads are actually just the one display, so the client has no
idea that it's actually being dragged onto a different physical screen.

I guess its possible to be able to teach Xinerama about using remote
displays, however the trick will be getting around xauth issues (since a
client must authenticate with the X server its connecting to; you're
probably going to have to start both servers in an insecure state.
(that's probably fine if they have their X server ports unavailable to
the internet, and you trust the people on the other machine ;)

-- 
Matt
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/attachments/20021130/61e1046b/attachment.bin