/tech/ - Technology★

actually I did just get XDMX to work, with mate on top of xfce. xfce did not like running another session on top of itself.

now it's just also unbearably slow. basic things would work fine, but I need to span a browser session, preferably sharing the same profile, which is why standard x forwarding doesn't work (firefox and chromium won't open the same profile twice). firefox/chromium are so slow with xmdx it's not a usable solution.

in case anyone is curious in the future, I didn't X to talk to other X servers over the network normally, I used ssh.

-install xdmx on server that will be running the xdmx session

-make sure X is running on both client and server, start your regular desktop environment.

-xhost + may or may not be necessary on server

-configure startx on server to start something that ISN'T the currently running session, mate if it's already running xfce, etc.

-client: ssh -Y {server}

-client ssh session: startx -- /usr/bin/Xdmx :1 +xinerama -display :0 -display:127.0.0.1:10.0 -ignorebadfontpaths -norender

the new spanned session should now pop on both client and server monitors.

"-display :0" above is the client's display

"-display:127.0.0.1:10.0" is the server's display

export | grep DISP on client ssh session to get server's display which should output "declare -x DISPLAY="localhost:10.0". localhost might not work, 127.0.0.1 does.

most of this was sorted out from a 10 year old youjew video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOzRCBGDVaE

because there's almost no documentation on this.

sucks this is too slow to be usable.

>>906205

why do you think it should be fast? it essentially has to stream tons of GUI events across 50 computers, while everything has to be rendered on 1 cpu. so basically you just made a 16K monitor but you're using one shitty gpu or integrated graphics to power it.

>>906360

i could see how sending all of the X shit across to multiple computers would be slow, but vnc should be much faster on a local lan, if I could get it setup right. x11vnc is way slower than the already slow xdmx.

all that needs to happen here is the screen needs to be extended past what the monitor is showing, already possible and fast with xrandr, and that should be hardware accelerated and everything and long as the video card supports the resolution, which mine does, it'll handle 4k, it can handle 2x 1080p.

then, it just needs to stream that off monitor section of the screen, with vnc, or literally anything, you can stream your desktop at 30fps with zero problems over the internet, this should be possible over a lan. You don't need to send mouse events or anything like that, or any of the standard vnc functionality really, the mouse will follow onto the off-monitor screen perfectly fine in the video/stream. the trick is getting it to stream only the offset, and with some speed.

maybe i need to look at this from the standpoint of video streaming, not vnc. the client should be able to use VLC or literally the browser to view this off-monitor screen stream.

X was designed so you could do that, but X sucks.

You see, Project Loki was designed from the beginning to
be an open, platform-independent system to develop
educational software.  So what did they do?  They decided to
go with UNIX.  They bought the propiganda.


They then discovered that they had to rewrite large parts of
it.  The decision to go with UNIX effectively subverted
Loki's goal of developing educational software into a goal
of trying to develop and maintain a networked system of
workstations.

Today, Loki's biggest contributions are the development of
the X window System and Kerberos.  The first is a bad window
system that runs on a bad operating system.  Nevermind that
there were better window systems than X when it was
invented, and that today there are even better ones than
those.  And Kerberos, as you know, is designed to bring
security to an inherently insecure platform, UNIX.  It is so
difficult to use and install that it fits UNIX to a T.

Loki has completely lost guidance --- it no longer
considers writing educational software to be the purpose of
the project (which has, incidently, been canceled).  Just
like the purpose of UNIX is no longer a small, compact
research operating system.