Jonathan Oxer
[Blog]
>> Out-geeked by Mike Beattie? No way!
Wed, May 11th 9:44am 2005 >> Tech Toys
So, Mike Beattie is chuffed about his funky new triple-head setup, eh? Sorry to say it Mike, but that's actually the standard arrangement here at IVT! Pretty much everybody has a triple-head system, although of course I had to go just a little bit further and have a quad-head setup ;-0 Leaving aside the general messiness for a moment, what you're looking at is three monitors connected to a box under my desk using a dual-port Nvidia card (with both ports used in a TwinView configuration) and a triple-port Radeon card (only using one port at the moment). The two right hand monitors are treated as a single virtual monitor by TwinView, and that is in turn linked to the left hand monitor using Xinerama. OK, sounds reasonable enough up to this point, but this is when things get just plain weird. The desktop you see on those three heads is *not* on the machine under the desk: it's actually an XDMCP session to the laptop you see on the left! That means I can log out, shut down the laptop, and take it away and still have the exact same environment as if I was sitting at my desk (sans some screen real estate, unfortunately). The box under the desk is basically just acting as a thin client for the laptop. But it doesn't stop there. I'm also logged into the laptop (as a different user, to allow multiple GNOME sessions to operate) and then the keyboard and mouse from the desk machine are shared back to the laptop using x2x, giving me direct access to 4 monitors. I can't drag windows to/from the laptop screen of course, but copy/paste works so it's not too much of a limitation. Hmm, maybe if I counted the Palm screen which displays my tasks / calendar from Evolution I could claim it as a pentuple-head setup ;-)
So, Mike Beattie is chuffed about his funky new triple-head setup, eh? Sorry to say it Mike, but that's actually the standard arrangement here at IVT! Pretty much everybody has a triple-head system, although of course I had to go just a little bit further and have a quad-head setup ;-0 Leaving aside the general messiness for a moment, what you're looking at is three monitors connected to a box under my desk using a dual-port Nvidia card (with both ports used in a TwinView configuration) and a triple-port Radeon card (only using one port at the moment). The two right hand monitors are treated as a single virtual monitor by TwinView, and that is in turn linked to the left hand monitor using Xinerama. OK, sounds reasonable enough up to this point, but this is when things get just plain weird. The desktop you see on those three heads is *not* on the machine under the desk: it's actually an XDMCP session to the laptop you see on the left! That means I can log out, shut down the laptop, and take it away and still have the exact same environment as if I was sitting at my desk (sans some screen real estate, unfortunately). The box under the desk is basically just acting as a thin client for the laptop. But it doesn't stop there. I'm also logged into the laptop (as a different user, to allow multiple GNOME sessions to operate) and then the keyboard and mouse from the desk machine are shared back to the laptop using x2x, giving me direct access to 4 monitors. I can't drag windows to/from the laptop screen of course, but copy/paste works so it's not too much of a limitation. Hmm, maybe if I counted the Palm screen which displays my tasks / calendar from Evolution I could claim it as a pentuple-head setup ;-)
>> Yet more conference goodness
Wed, May 4th 4:57pm 2005 >> Conferences
Seems there are conferences coming at me from every direction right now: on Monday I met with Minnie Constan from AES who will be running LinuxWorld Expo in Sydney next year, and tonight is the transition meeting from OSDC2004 to OSDC2005. I was on the papers committee last year and will probably be again this year. I'm pretty pleased with the way the various conferences are coming together: there was talk some time ago about needing a conf that's more suit-focused to take the pressure off LCA, and along comes LWE. And OSDC provides an intermediate event that's not as hard-core as LCA, but not suity like LWE: just right for people who use FOSS tools but aren't necessarily Linuxaholics. Matt Palmer summed it up beautifully on linux-aus: LCA: Those who make OSS OSDC: Those who use OSS to make software (OSS or otherwise) LWE: Anyone who pays people to go to the previous two conferences
Seems there are conferences coming at me from every direction right now: on Monday I met with Minnie Constan from AES who will be running LinuxWorld Expo in Sydney next year, and tonight is the transition meeting from OSDC2004 to OSDC2005. I was on the papers committee last year and will probably be again this year. I'm pretty pleased with the way the various conferences are coming together: there was talk some time ago about needing a conf that's more suit-focused to take the pressure off LCA, and along comes LWE. And OSDC provides an intermediate event that's not as hard-core as LCA, but not suity like LWE: just right for people who use FOSS tools but aren't necessarily Linuxaholics. Matt Palmer summed it up beautifully on linux-aus: LCA: Those who make OSS OSDC: Those who use OSS to make software (OSS or otherwise) LWE: Anyone who pays people to go to the previous two conferences
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