Re: Dual display on Blade 2000

From: DoN. Nichols (dnichols_at_d-and-d.com)
Date: 08/30/05 

Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:39:52 GMT

In article <IM0EKM.FFv@cjsa.com>, Jeffery Small <jeff@cjsa.com> wrote:
>stali <stali@purdue.edu> writes:
>
>>Is it possible to use two monitors on a Sun Blade 2000 (dual procs)
>>running two 'separate' CDE/Gnome sessions.
>
>Yes. I have a SunFire V250 with two XVR-100 frame buffers and two Planar
>20" flat panel monitors running two separate gnome 2.0 desktop sessions.
>One way to start the dual desktop session is to modify the entry in the
>/etc/dt/config/Xservers file. Here is my entry:
>
>:0 Local local_uid@console root /usr/openwin/bin/Xsun -nobanner \
> -dev /dev/fbs/pfb1 defdepth 24 -dev /dev/fbs/pfb0 left defdepth 24

        Is this just running double-headed from a single keyboard and
mouse, or is it actually running two sessions with separate keyboard and
mouse? I *think* that is what the original poster wanted to do, based
on your quoting of his text.

>It may be possible to run two monitors off the digital and analog ports of
>a single XVR-100 card, but if I recall correctly, this has some display
>limitations and performance ramifications.
>
>I would like to use a more recent version of gnome, but up through version
>2.8.0 there has been some serious problems starting and using the desktop
>on the 2nd screen. I don't know why version 2.0 as shipped with Solaris 9,
>works. It may be that the Sun engineers fixed some bugs before including
>it in the OS.

        I wonder whether it can be the problem which a friend has
experienced with Gnome -- it wants to lock all the files it uses to
maintain the preferences and such, so even a user with a home directory
on a NFS-mounted filesystem *can't* run the same window manager on a
second system, thanks to those locks. There is no such problem with
CDE, nor with OpenWindows (back when that was a choice), nor with tvwm
in my experience. I don't know *why* Gnome was written this way. I
guess that it was simply that the coders had never run a multi-machine
network with NFS shared home directories -- or if they had, they only
ran the window manager on one, and ssh (or rsh) logged into the other
systems (which is what I *usually* do.) However, when one system hangs
up or otherwise has problems, and an attempt needs to be made to access
it from another, (or just because of convenience of location) it is
*not* nice to be locked out because the window manager is already
running on another system.

        Enjoy,
                DoN. 

-- 
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