Subject: Xinerama multi-head

From: Jason L Tibbitts III <[email-masked]>
Date: 28 Jun 1999 10:10:55 -0500

I'm not sure if there are any XFree devel group members here besides me,
but this may be useful anyway.  XFree 4 supports a mode called Xinerama
where multiple heads are supported at the client level simply as a single
surface with lots of pixels.  The extension merely chooses the common
visuals from all existing cards and strings things together at a low level.

I think this is going to be a big thing, but it doesn't work too well with
current window managers.  The problem with this is that things like window
positioning and maximizing do what you want because the WM doesn't know
that the big bunch of pixels it sees are really organized in some fashion.
There may even be holes in the desktop.

I'm trying to get someone to detail an API for determining where the
boundaries and holes are.  This will most likely result in is obtaining a
list of rectangles that are OK to position windows entirely within.  Can
someone familiar with window positioning and such give an idea as to how
difficult it might be to handle these situations:

1) User maximizes window.  FVWM chooses the union of all 'view rectangles'
   (or whatever they call it) that the window is an and maximizes to the
   rectangle containing all of those.  (This works great for
   identically-sized heads but doesn't do too well if the desktop has
   holes.)

2) New windows appear within the view rectangle that the mouse is currently
   in.

That would take care of the complaints I've seen so far.  On the other
hand, FVWM already has some kind of multi-head support but I don't know how
it works at all.  Perhaps some of these issues have been solved in a
reasonable manner already.

 - J<
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---

From: Matthias Clasen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 20:25:13 +0200

> reasonable manner already.

Do you refer to the fact that fvwm can handle multiple *screens* ? 
That is something a bit different: screens are independent monitors 
sharing a keyboard and mouse. You can move the pointer between them,
but windows cannot be moved from screen to screen, since they may have
totally incompatible visuals. fvwm handles them by simply spawning copies
for each screen it finds.

Matthias

Btw, I don't think the tasks you mention are very hard to implement,
once the XFree team comes up with an X extension to get at the list
of rectangles.

-- 
Matthias Clasen, 
Tel. 0761/203-5606
Email: [email-masked]
Mathematisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg
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