Re: An alternative to MDI / new WM feature ?

[Steve Dunham <dunham cps msu edu>]

"Jens Ch. Restemeier" <jchrr@post.uni-bielefeld.de> writes:

> Hi !
> 
> > ->  > actually most of what you say is infact a window-manager issue.. one
> > ->  > which I hope to address in Enlightenment after the 0.14 rewrite. I
> > ->  > and considering ways of having virtual desktops AND allow you to
> > ->  > drag one infront/behind the other... :) I COULD do this in X if I
> <snip>

> There's another WM / X related thing I wanted to ask for some time: 
> Macintosh does this for ages, and Win 98 does it, too: Multiple monitor
> support. Thanks to the PCI slots in PC (and the slots in older macs) you
> can put more than one videoboard into those computers, and connect a
> monitor to all of them. Now you can have a connected desktop on all
> these monitors, you can even drag a window to the border, to show one
> half of it on one monitor, and the other half on the other monitor. On
> Macintosh it is even possible to run both boards on a different
> colordepth, i.e. use the built-in bw-monitor of older compact macs for
> toolboxes, and a 21" RGB-Monitor for graphics.

> Some newer developments in Linux, for example GGI, allow to control more
> than one videoboard, and you can launch an X-server on every board.

> Now the question: Would an Window-manager be able to connect to more
> than one X-server, and to join the screens into one big desktop ? Would
> this require additional work with the widget-set ?

What exactly do you want?  X has supported multiple monitors (screens)
for quite a while, but it does it with just one instance of the X
server.  I'm typing this on a Sparc Linux box with two monitors, one
of them is 24 bit and the other is 8 bit.  I can move the mouse
between screens.  My window manager (wmaker) doesn't grok multiple
screens, so I have to run it twice, once for each screen. (twm
understands multiple screens, but I'm not sure what else does.)  You
can't move stuff from screen to screen, but c'est la vie.

I'm also running "x2x" which allows me to move my mouse off of the
left side of my i386 Linux box onto the screens of my sparc Linux
box. So I have 3 screens on 2 machines (4 screens, 3 machines if my
laptop is hooked up).  x2x also syncronizes the selection between the
X servers.


(Actually, you could move stuff from server to server using "xmove".)


Steve
dunham@cps.msu.edu