[rescue] 670MP windfall in the surplus diving frenzy today.....

[Dave McGuire]

On June 20, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> Now does this work in the traditional way where programs are confined to
> one display or the other, or is it the more modern Mac, Windows, Xinerama
> way?

  The former...and I doubt that will change anytime soon, at least not
without an X protocol extension.

The heads in X are called "hostname:display.screen"...if you have a
SPARC machine with two CG6s running X, they'll be called
"hostname:0.0" (or simply ":0.0") and "hostname:0.1", in which the
last digit is the "screen" number.  X clients connect to TCP port
6000+screen_number to come up on either screen.  That means that, to
move an X client's window(s) from one screen to the other would
require moving an active TCP connection from one port to another...not
something that's easy or practical to do.

  It seems theoretically possible to write an X protocol extension to
support this, though.  There'd have to be a message sent from the
server to the client requesting a "screen" change, after which the
client would drop the connection and reestablish it on the other
screen's port.  Some provision would have to be made for maintaining
the client's current state, perhaps through maintaining the X client
id across the two connections.

          -Dave McGuire