A couple of Dual Head questions

drumvudu · 07-02-2006, 02:43 PM

I was wondering a few things concerning my dual head setup. I have been running dual head for years but recently, I had the occasion to need a different setup and found myself wondering if it is possible. First, is it possible to run two different window managers at eh the same time on different screens such as gnome on desktop 1 and KDE on desktop 2?
Second, is it possible to run a window manager on one screen and run in terminal mode on the other? I recognise that i can simply run xterm fullscreen, i just want to know if it is possible and if so, how. None of these issues are hardware dependent but if it matters, i am running two Acer 19" AL1912 LCD Flatscreens and two Nvidia GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X
graphics accels on SuSE 10. TIA...//drum

jschiwal · 07-02-2006, 04:28 PM

Yes, you can run independant displays. The xinit command has an argument for the display. The display on the second screen should indicate the you want to use screen 1 and not screen 0.

It is also possible to have this setup as a xorg.conf profile. You can use the BusID entry to determine which screen entry uses which display.

The easiest way would be to enter "xinit -- :0.1". This will start an xserver on the second display and run xterm in it. Then you can start the window manager in xterm. If you have gnome on DISPLAY=':0.0', you can have KDE running in the second display, DISPLAY=':0.1'.

You can use the -display option to start a program in one session, and have it displayed in another.

Here is an example where you use the same display but use different virtual screens.
Start X on vt/8 with the command: "xinit -- :1"
Start Window Maker on the second display by typing "wmaker &" in xterm.
Switch back to VT/7 running KDE, and enter in a shell: "konsole -display ':1' &"
The konsole terminal displays on vt/8. If your system allows it, you could have even started the program on a different computer. It would then run on the remote computer, but the terminal and display would be using VT/8's display.

drumvudu · 07-02-2006, 08:33 PM

I really had to believe that this was possible. Thanks a ton for the valuable info and example.