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

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, June 20, 2001 at 20:43:10 (-0400), Dave McGuire wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] 670MP windfall in the surplus diving frenzy today.....
>
>   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.

I suspect Xinerama is the better solution.  (Originally DEC called it
XPanoramiX, but it was first shipped as Xinerama in X11R6.4 and is also
now in XFree86-4.x.)  Several people have claimed they've had it working
with Solaris (including up to Solaris-8), so it might just work with
NetBSD too.  The only major constraint is that all screens have to be
set at the same colour depth.

Unfortunately NetBSD's xsrc isn't X11R6.4 or newer (it's still just
X11R6.3, mostly because The NetBSD Foundation didn't want to deal with
new issues in the R4 licensing, though IIRC th X Consortium have "fixed"
those issues in the mean time).

But that doesn't mean you can't get the original X11R6.6 distribution
and build an X11 server from it -- that's what I always used to do under
SunOS-4 and even in the early NetBSD/sun3 days, though of course that
was with X11R4 and X11R5.  :-)   ftp://ftp.x.org/pub/R6.6/  (it's big!)

Eventually NetBSD might use Xfree86 on sparc, but currently it does not.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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