Re: GNOME Summary, June 7-14

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

I was mainly pointing out that the current session manager has the
capability to set the DISPLAY environment variable for apps it starts up.

As for saving only the part of the DISPLAY variable after the colon, this
would break down if my X display was :1.0 on one machine and :0.0 on
others.  For most dual head machines, adding a simple modification to the
panel so that it sets the DISPLAY environment variable to a value set in
the preferences.

It may be possible to get things working by adding the following to your
~/.gnome/session file (I have not tried this -- I don't have a multihead
machine):
12,id=default12
12,Priority=40
12,RestartCommand=panel --sm-client-id default12
12,Environment=DISPLAY=:0.1

(you may want to adjust the numbers slightly, and you will want to update
the num_clients property in the file).  I have not looked at the session
management stuff much, but this may do what you want.  (I am not sure if I
got the syntax for the Environment setting correct, as I couldn't see any
applications that set the property).

James.

--
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/


On Fri, 18 Jun 1999, Mark R. Bowyer wrote:

> 
> >From: James Henstridge <james@daa.com.au>
> 
> >The problem is deciding when to set this.  For instance it could cause a
> >few problems if you saved your GNOME session on one machine, then moved to
> >another only to find your applications open on the first machine.  For the
> >panel it would probably be useful to have a place in the preferences where
> >you could force a value for DISPLAY.  This would solve the immediate
> >problems with two screen displays.
> 
> Well, the DISPLAY values would be :0.0, :0.1 and :0.2 on my system, so if I 
> tried going in to the machine next to me instead, and the DISPLAY value for each 
> application session managed was used, I'd just not get the apps I'd normally 
> have on :0.2, and some errors would get logged somewhere.  I shouldn't ever have 
> a name in the DISPLAY variable, so trying to start them on a different host 
> shouldn't be an issue.
> 
> I'm not sure this is the nicest fix, though.  The display they appear on should 
> have it's own preference entry in the same way as the geometry or Virtual 
> Desktop used.  It's a hint, not something to force.  So that if I don't *have* a 
>:0.2 (and only my machine here does, while most every other is dual-headed - 
> they're all UltraSPARC systems) those apps can be started on :0.1 instead, 
> rather than just failing.
> 
> I honestly think this is something that needs to be given more status than just 
> another environment variable.  So that I can also set up different Panels on 
> each screen, rather than being forced to have each one the same.
> 
> Having said that, Gnome and Enlightenment give far better support for 
> multi-headed systems than KDE, say ;O)
> 
> Ta,
> 
> -------My opinion - Not sane, intelligent or necessarily useful-------
> o o                                      mailto:Moredhel@earthling.net 
> /v\ark R. Bowyer.  http://i.am/Moredhel  mailto:Mark.Bowyer@UK.Sun.COM
> `-'         "Everything is true, for a given value of 'true'" - PTerry
>