GNOME on one screen, plain X on another?

[RiBBiT]

I have one graphics card with two VGA outputs, one is connected to a computer monitor and the other to a TV.

• On the computer monitor I would like GNOME running, preferably with the mouse pointer locked in there.
• On the TV, I'd like just plain X so that I can direct fullscreen video to it using mplayer.

It seemed fairly simple, but I can't get it to work.

I've tried to run one X server with two screens (:0.0 and :0.1). The problem here is that I get a GNOME desktop on each monitor, and the mouse pointer can be moved between them. Setting the $DISPLAY variable to :0.0 prior to running gnome-session or launching gnome-session with the --display flag makes no difference.

I've also tried to use two separate X servers, with one monitor for :0 and one for :1. This way I manage to run GNOME on one and just X on the other. The X servers end up on different VTs though, and if for an example I have :0 on VT7 and :1 on VT8, only one can be viewed at a time. If I switch to VT8 the computer monitor goes blank, and if I switch back to VT7 the TV goes blank. I tried forcing them both to the same VT and also tried the sharevts option, but that resulted in scrambled output.

Any ideas?

[Sadako]

I could be completely wrong, but I don't think what you're trying to do is (currently) possible.

While it is trivial to have two X servers running at once with the same graphics card, as I understand it only one of the X servers can be "in control" of the graphics hardware at a time.

But like i said, I could be wrong, and I'd love to know how to do this if it is possible.

One thing you could try is running one server inside another, take a look at Xnest or Xephyr.

[RiBBiT]

Too bad it isn't supported. Thanks for the tip about nested servers, Xephyr seems to be interesting.

I managed to find a workaround here for the biggest problem though. By putting the second screen on a fixed position some distance away from the other, the mouse pointer gets effectively locked in the first screen. Like so:

Code: Select all

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier  "ServerLayout"
    Screen      0 "Screen0" 0 0
    Screen      1 "Screen1" 2000 0
    InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

There are still two GNOME desktops, but the one on the TV does not bother me much. If I am not much mistaken, GNOME should in theory be able to keep its dirty fingers off the second screen. Hopefully it can be configured for that somehow.