Greetings,
The recent discussion of Xinerama reminded me of something I've long
wished for.
I want my XFree to use two monitors, Xinerama-style (primarily, being
able to move windows between monitors). The catch is that one of these
monitors also serves a Windows box, so I can't use the normal two-card
setup.
It would be nice if XFree had a "loopback" driver that takes an
arbitrary X display and treats it as a simple framebuffer [1]. I could
then run an X server on the Windows box, "mount" it into XFree and use
Xinerama. Performance might suffer, but that's a minor issue.
Does such a driver exist? I couldn't find any mention in the docs or
Google, but it's a tough search item.
Such a driver might also be useful in other cases. For instance, the
antialiased font support of GTK and QT requires the XRENDER extension,
which AFAIK is available only in XFree. Thus if you use a different X
server (e.g., XVNC or some Windows X server) you can't get antialiased
fonts. The loopback driver would solve this, if the network connection
is fast enough.
[1] Actually the loopback driver can be much faster, and maybe easier to
write, if it does use some more primitive X commands.
Also, there's some difficulty concerning window managers if the remote
display handles some other stuff, as is the case in multiple-window
configuration of Windows X servers. Solving this requires information at
the level of logical windows, which is normally not known to the X
driver. I think that addressing this would require a local helper
program (which is an X client), or even of the local window manager.
This definitely complicates things.
Regards,
Eran Tromer
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