Is Xinerama support for multi-head displays feasible?

New features which should be implemented in Porteus Kiosk Edition and the kiosk wizard.
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bburke
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Is Xinerama support for multi-head displays feasible?

Post#1 by bburke » 09 Jul 2015, 23:39

Greetings again. Today, in a meeting with one of our departments about digital signage, the department head inquired about the possibility in the future of creating a multi-head display. She would like to have 4 TVs arrayed in a 2x2 grid as one large virtual display (obviously, the proper hardware with 4 video outs would be required). As this project is in the early speculative phase, I was asked by my boss to inquire about the feasibility of such a feature in Porteus Kiosk. Would it require an extensive rewrite of the existing infrastructure? Would it be possible to implement Xinerama support entirely in an optional module?

Again, this is not a feature request. This is just a question of feasibility. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

Thanks and keep up the great work on Porteus Kiosk!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that we are also looking into hardware solutions, such as Matrox's GXM products.

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fanthom
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Re: Is Xinerama support for multi-head displays feasible?

Post#2 by fanthom » 10 Jul 2015, 08:49

for next release i'm hoping to have a single unified window page in the wizard for all settings related to video outputs:
- set resolution (with and option to disable certain output - like LVDS1)
- set refresh rate
- set brightness (where applies - laptops only?)
- rotate options (normal, left, right, inverted)

perhaps we could add an option to position the screen with:

Code: Select all

--left-of, --right-of, --above, --below, --same-as another-output
or use the '--pos' argument.

more info:
http://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/ma ... ndr.1.html
Please add [Solved] to your thread title if the solution was found.

bburke
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Re: Is Xinerama support for multi-head displays feasible?

Post#3 by bburke » 10 Jul 2015, 14:16

I wasn't aware the RandR extension could split a single screen across multiple physical monitors without Xinerama. That's good to know. I found this post to be very informative in addition to the documentation you linked: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/li ... t-xinerama

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