linux display server
 

I have a small home office with a few linux boxes of different flavors. Wondering if anybody could help me out with the following:

I'd like to add a couple of monitors to my setup. The problem is that the main machine that I work off of doesn't have any expansion ports left. I have a server running with no monitors and a dual monitor card. I do most of my work from Workstation (A). Is it possible to set up server (B) via IP as a display server so that (A) would recognize it as an extended (Spanning) Desktop?

so basically:

Workstation (A):CentOs5 Server(B):CentOs5

| srcn0 | | scrn1 |---->[LAN]<-------- | scrn2 | |::: scrn3::: |

to complicate things a bit scrn3 is a different size.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

sorry for the diagram.

I am personally unaware of a method to set it up in this manner. There are a lot of ways you could set it up to access the other machines desktop but not how you want to.

i feel like there must be a way to simulate the IP stream to/from (B) as some kind of "virtual" serial device.

The better suspicion is that the x server was modeled after networking... unfortunatly that would still mean running 2 xservers. Like using a video card that doesn't support Twinview or Dual Head setups.

Im thinking that there must be a solution using technology similar to KVM over IP. I've never used a IP KVM switch but I imagine that they must present the monitors to the connected systems as virtual devices. There must be some way to pipe output from an X server on (A) to IP then directly to (B), and device details the reverse. I will look into open source KVM over IP solutions. if anybody knows of any please let me know.
Thanks.

No Problem running an X server on system (B)- already has one installed. If trying to get a spanning desktop is too complicated, for now I wouldn't mind using Sys (B) as a second desktop for Sys (A). is this possible?


also i'm looking at xinerama and XRandR but i think thats the wrong direction. However xdmx is looking like it might be possible:

http://dmx.sourceforge.net/

any comments are apprecieated

By the way Open source KVM if anybody's interested:

http://okvm.sourceforge.net/kvmoverip.html

However this still requires a PCI card so its not a solution for me. I'll look through the code though to see if there's anything that I could use.

Think I've found the answer.
If anybody's interesed, it looks like Xdmx and xinerama are the answer. Xdmx is included with the RHEL5 distro, and is a sourceforge progect:

http://dmx.sourceforge.net/

actually though an IBM page explains the HOWTO much better:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/li...hed/index.html