SunRay@Home: the Future
With the major hurdle out of the way, I have to think about how to progress.
Number one on my list of things to fix is… the mouse. It’s a pain in the backside having to switch my USB trackball into the SunRay unit when I want to use it. I’m hoping to pilfer a new rolly-wheel USB mouse from work tomorrow to alleviate this problem.
Going from a 24” widescreen panel to a single 17” monitor results in what is affectionately known as “scrolling hell”. I don’t like it. The way I see it there are a few options: run at 1280×1024 on the 24” panel at work; live with it; or (this one I actually like) attempt to get a dual head group set up for the TWO SunRay units I brought home from work.
SunRay units are seriously cool pieces of kit. SunRay’s can act as either a master, slave or operate solely (I guess that’s like a master with no slaves). By configuring two SunRay’s as a master/slave pair, two monitors can be associated to a single session, allowing a much larger virtual desktop. Xinerama is the Xorg feature that supports this, and it can work in two ways:
- The wrong way. The X server is told that the display is X by Y pixels in size. It treats it no differently from one physical monitor.
- The right way. The X server is told that there are two monitors and where each one is, relative to the other (or indeed in absolute terms, if you like things that way). It treats the virtual display with respect: it knows to maximise applications to a single display only, to present the window list and menus on the primary screen only, and (arguably most usefully of all) knows not to stick important notices in the middle of the virtual display, spanning two physical monitors.
At home I obviously run things the “right” way. At work, James has a dual-head setup and has it configured (last time I looked) the “wrong” way. It’s a pain in the backside, but I recall that when I used his SunRay my desktop was spanned across two monitors in the same “wrong” way. This is interesting: I could use the “wrong” way to allow me to make the majority of my desktop visible at the same time. I could go further, and limit my vertical resolution to 1024 on the 24” panel at work… this would allow me to get the full display at home easily.
Plenty more things for me to work on…
Tags: Solaris
December 5th, 2006 at 9:40 am
There is no way to specify the resolution that you want an active session to be changed to when you connect?
December 5th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Well.
I don’t think there’s anything stopping you from changing once you’re connected, so you could work this in to the utaction script that gets executed everytime you insert/remove your card. Obviously by doing this you’d have to figure out how to ask the connected monitor how big it was.
So let’s assume it can be done (it probably can): what happens to all of the neatly laid out windows, icons, etc. that are now being resized to 1280×1024 from whatever the hell a 24” panel runs at?
December 5th, 2006 at 10:52 am
Your windows are neatly positioned? Mine are spread all over the place. The panels should take care of themselves, if they are intelligent enough. My icons are managed by a program that stores the positions in relative values, so if I connect to the worlds biggest display they will just get spaced out, on a really small one they just get squashed together/re-arranged as appropriate.
December 5th, 2006 at 10:55 am
Yep. I work heavily with virtual desktops so I don’t need to use alt+Tab a lot. It’s rare that I have windows overlapping as most of the tasks can be dedicated a desktop of their own.