"NonDesktop" Proposed For RandR: Useful For VR & Apple Touch Bar Like Devices

[phoronix]

Phoronix: "NonDesktop" Proposed For RandR: Useful For VR & Apple Touch Bar Like Devices

Besides Keith Packard working on the concept of resource leasing for the X.Org Server and resource leasing support for RandR, he's also now proposing a "NonDesktop" property for the Resize and Rotate protocol...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NonDesktop-RandR

[dwagner]

The proposal sounds reasonable to me. I think it might even be useful for some ordinary desktop PCs that have a primary monitor connected for usual work, but also some TV connected for occasional video playback.

[johanb]

If support for the Apple TouchBar would be available in the future, would it be possible to disable this "NonDesktop" property so we for example could put conky on the TouchBar display? That would be pretty cool.

[raster]

If support for the Apple TouchBar would be available in the future, would it be possible to disable this "NonDesktop" property so we for example could put conky on the TouchBar display? That would be pretty cool.

Not sure it'd be up to Xorg to do this... it'd be up to your WM. This really is useful for WM's to just ignore specific non-desktop randr screens for normal use but then they could offer things like "assign application X to special screen Y" where special screen is one of a set of N "non-desktop" screens. this would of course also be good for games/vr etc. etc. too...

[haagch]

The idea is that these NonDesktop monitors can be used with drm leases. I assume there will be a wrapper script to get a lease and then display an X application on it, maybe something like "drm-lease --output HDMI-A-1 conky"

[artivision]

On Ubuntu Laptop i have 1600i, 1440i, 1360i and 1024i. On Fedora 1600i and 1024i. Fix everything else is my opinion.

[starshipeleven]

The idea is that these NonDesktop monitors can be used with drm leases. I assume there will be a wrapper script to get a lease and then display an X application on it, maybe something like "drm-lease --output HDMI-A-1 conky"

Cool, I always wanted to connect a random smallish hdmi/VGA/whatever screen and show a hardware status/readout.

[devius]

On Ubuntu Laptop i have 1600i, 1440i, 1360i and 1024i. On Fedora 1600i and 1024i. Fix everything else is my opinion.

wat

...

[grok]

Cool, I always wanted to connect a random smallish hdmi/VGA/whatever screen and show a hardware status/readout.

I suppose you can do about the same by connecting a smartphone (e.g. a deprecated one) and running an X11 server on it (or ssh terminal, or telnet), bonus point if that's achieved with USB networking between the phone and PC computer.

e.g. on Firefox OS 1.x you can enable USB tethering whether the phone accesses a network or not. Funnily, you can browse to a web server running on the desktop. So if you have a web server based hardware/system readout thing, it'd work on the phone browser! (as long as you don't use web features that were unavailable in 2014 or 2015. sigh!). Perhaps you can serve a web page with e.g. anyterm and have a lame browser based terminal that runs on phone browsers.

If support for the Apple TouchBar would be available in the future, would it be possible to disable this "NonDesktop" property so we for example could put conky on the TouchBar display? That would be pretty cool.

You got a nice answer already but I was thinking instead that "NonDesktop" would be nice to run conky or other things. NonDesktop would be used to prevent silly things - windows getting partially moved into there, the mouse pointer flying into there if you don't want it to, the desktop considering touch bar is your primary display. Albeit if you accidentally declare your real display as NonDesktop you'll have messed it up.

[schmidtbag]

I'm curious to see how this turns out - sounds interesting.