Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.x
Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 21:42:12 GMT

:: I have a desktop and a laptop and would like to use my laptop as a
:: secondary screen.  Also, I would like to be able to use the same
:: keyboard/mouse for both, at the same time.  beeing able to move a
:: window from one screen to another like if it was only one.

> http://dmx.sourceforge.net/[]  might be what you're looking for

I would also refer you to

http://ftp.digital.com/pub/Digital/SRC/x2x/

and

The venerable x2x tool allows a single keyboard and mouse to control multiple X sessions, and moving from screen to screen can be set to occur when the mouse cursor "moves off an edge" of one display, whence it will appear on the adjoining edge of another display. Selection and cut buffers are synchronized.

VNC can be used in much the same way as dmx; the added features of VNC (accessability from most any platform, even any java-enabled web browser, session restarts, etc) are also there. For example, if you have two screens, you can start an Xvnc session the size of both of them side-by-side. For example, if you have two 1024x768 physical displays, you can create a single Xvnc virtual desktop of size 2048x768. Then, you can run vncviewer on each of the physical displays, each vncviewer displaying half the virtual desktop. This works reasonably well if one of the screens is mostly used to park display processes. You could couple it with x2x, but note that simply dragging a window from one physical screen to the other would still require you to drag it to span the divide, then drag it the rest of the way after warping the mouse to the other display (hopefully the limitation I'm talking about is clear).

So. VNC and x2x have some advantages over dmx.

Ultimately, dmx will be a better tool, and will have better support tools for dealing with window management to make the breaks between physical displays act more smoothly. But the other two are also worth looking at.

Wayne Throop