At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason.

But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and development that I wanted to do.

It helped me to get the best job of my life.

I’ve been working at VMware for more than 4 years now. I only have this job because I’ve taught myself everything I know about programming languages, and most of that has been through my work in the Open Source communities I’ve participated in over the last 15 years.

Most recently, I’ve had a blast as a KPilot/KDE PIM developer. I’ve met more people from all around the world and I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But KPilot and Palm Pilots in general have long since lost relevance. And sadly, I was never able to find a new itch to scratch and a new area to start contributing to. It’s been years now since I’ve contributed any sizable amount of code to any Open Source community. I’ve waited, hoping that I’d find more time, or that I’d find a new itch to scratch, or that I’d get the urge to start hacking on Linux Desktop stuff again. But it hasn’t happened, and I have no reason to think it’s going to anytime soon.

Over the past several years, I’ve become increasingly irritated and frustrated by the ever-changing-and-not-always-in-good-ways Linux Desktop. I’ve blogged before about this and got quite a bit of feedback about it. That was two years ago, almost exactly. What has changed since then? In my mind, absolutely nothing. Now we have Ubuntu turning the desktop on its head again with Ubuntu Unity and destabilizing applications that have worked perfectly well for years and years. I know this because I’ve been working on VMware’s Workstation and Player products for the Linux Desktop for the last 4 years and I can’t tell you how much time and frustration and energy I’ve had to put into last minute bug fixes to work around new and broken in “exciting ways” behavior in Linux Desktop Environments. That’s the kind of thing that really sucks the life and soul out of you, especially when it’s something that you’ve cared so deeply about for so very long.

You have to understand… I have been one of the most outspoken and zealous of Linux Desktop proponents you’d ever want to meet. And I do believe that the Linux Desktop is awesome and a worthwhile thing to use, if only to keep down on the amount of ongoing upkeep you have to do to your PC thanks to viruses, malware, etc. But I have decided to move away from caring about Desktop Linux and I don’t know if I’ll be back, personally.

I’ve always looked at jwz’s “final straw” rant and thought that I could never get there. I’ve invested too much time and energy in Desktop Linux and cared too much about it to give up on it, right? Well, I was wrong, I guess. =:)

So, this isn’t meant to be a slam on Linux or a slam on KDE or a slam on Open Source or anything else. Just chalk it up to an old, cranky dude who became disillusioned with the Linux Desktop if you want. Or chalk it up to said old, cranky dude finally having enough money to buy a Mac and seeing how beautifully it runs and really enjoying it and not wanting to deal with for Linux Desktop on his personal daily equipment anymore.

But anyway, I just wanted to put this out there. I feel like I’m losing part of who I am by doing it officially and all. But I have been using and developing on Apple’s OS X lately and I’m thoroughly loving it. A couple of months ago, the opportunity presented itself at work and I made the switch from the VMware Linux Workstation/Player team to the VMware Fusion team, and I’m really loving it. I had been feeling like I’ve been stagnating lately and not learning or growing as a developer. I had been wanting to make a change and learn new technology and languages. And thus far, I’m really liking Objective-C and Mac development.

So at this point, I’m going to remove myself from planet KDE and take a break from Linux Desktop for a while. I’ve actually been not blogging for quite a while now because I know it’s not going to be relevant to planet KDE and that’s been another source of frustration, so I’m going to rectify that now too. I’ve been meaning to remove myself from the planet KDE feed for a while now, but 1) I felt like I should say some kind of goodbye and 2) I can’t seem to be able to log in to my svn+ssh account anymore to remove myself from the planet feed. =:/

Anyway, sorry to all my KDE friends. I feel like I’m letting you guys down. But truth be told, I haven’t been doing anything in the last couple of years anyway. =:/ I guess it’s just a normal part of life and different phases of it or something. We’ll see where this road goes. I’m hoping that at the very least, this will let me feel like I can start blogging again. =:)

1. Frustration with a particular admittedly proprietary application that didn’t use to have any problems in Ubuntu 8.10, and since then has been nothing but trouble for me and roughly 90,000 other people. You may say that it’s unfair to fly off the handle at one proprietary application having problems and condemn all of Desktop Linux, but I do not think this is limited to only one proprietary application.
2. A shiny new MacBook Pro in my possession and an epiphany of “this is what we’ve been working for, guys and we’ve been doing it for more than a decade and we’re still not there yet, why?”  And I’m not talking about the pretty UI or shiny buttons. You can argue all you want about OS X being the best in the UI/shiny/usability categories. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the increasingly growing market share of OS X and the (generally speaking) more polished and well-thought-out and 3rd-party-developed/supported applications. Being able to go to Flickr, for example, and download an actual client for OS X is pretty darned cool. Sure would be nice if Linux had the same mind/market share.

Now, having spent a week with my MacBook Pro in both Linux and OS X, I have a few more thoughts to add to the fire. Some of these have been results of discussions had as a result from my earlier post on this subject and others are more related to time spent with said shiny new laptop. But I think these are more constructive and less inflammatory. =:)

1. The MacBook Pro is truly a nice laptop and Linux, for the most part, runs really well on it. The Karmic wiki page got me 95% of the way there. Unfortunately, rEFIT doesn’t understand GRUB2 at all, it seems, so to just get Kubuntu Karmic to boot, I installed the old GRUB 0.97 instead (sudo apt-get install grub). Getting sound to work requires alsa-driver-snapshot, so that’s a little painful but not too bad. More painful was the hour I spent yesterday trying to figure out why sound stopped working (and this time it wasn’t pulseaudio’s fault, but rather something weird with the ALSA driver that plugging headphones in and removing them seemed to fix). Getting click+drag to work on the MacBook Pro 5,5 (since there’s no physical buttons anymore, but just one big touchpad (WHICH IS REALLY NICE!!)) requires a custom bcm5974-dkms driver. I’m using an unjournaled hfsplus partition to share data between OS X and Linux. And “setxkbmap -option altwin:swap_lalt_lwin” (or setting the same checkbox in KDE4′s System Settings) lets me use the command/apple/squiggly key next to the space bar as my Alt key (for alt+tabbing, etc.). All in all, I’m REALLY happy with Linux on this MacBook Pro. It seems to work every bit as nicely as Linux does on my work Thinkpad T61.
2. There is something core to my nature that must tweak and hack, and Linux is most conducive to that. Take something simple, like wanting to change the font and font size that OS X uses for window titles, system menus, etc. Apparently you just can’t do it? That kind of stuff bothers me (and this is just one example in OS X that comes to mind). I truly do love Desktop Linux, and especially KDE for this reason. I’m not saying I couldn’t survive in OS X, and I still enjoy it and its apps. And if I have problems with things I need to do (audio/video conferencing comes immediately to mind), I have no hesitation booting into OS X to just get things done. And no, sorry, I just can’t stomach the thought of using Windows because I have to get things done. OS X may not be free, but at least I don’t vomit from just the thought of using it. But if for nothing other than the challenge of trying to figure out how to get things working to my liking, I feel compelled to run Linux on this little wee beastie. And maybe after I get things working to my liking, I’ll even find a couple of itches to scratch again and start being productive again. =:)
3. We’re (Desktop Linux) not there (3rd party developer interest, compared to OS X and Windows) yet, but I think we’re getting closer, and even so, we may just never get there and that’s not our fault, I don’t think. My original line of thinking was that we’re not there yet because we keep changing core system components that prevent 3rd party developers, etc, from taking our platform seriously. And I think that as much as possible, we should really try to stop changing/breaking stuff so that this is not the reason we don’t get there. However, we have other core values and tendencies in Desktop Linux that are most definitely contributing to us not getting there and some of them we cannot change. Let’s take an important one: Freedom. Both parts of freedom matter: both gratis (for zero price) and libre (free to do whatever I want to it). The first part means that 3rd party developers can expect to sell nowhere near as much of their software in Linux as they can on OS X or Windows. The second part means that 3rd party developers can expect to meet resistance to their very existence. I personally side with the former more than the latter on this, since I’m cheap by nature and like to not spend money whenever possible. Also, being that I have to work for a living and support myself and my family, I do not, for a second, fault companies for existing and needing to have me pay for things so they can exist. But I think I’m in the minority on this point in Desktop Linux. Lastly, we’re not a money-making machine like Apple and Microsoft, and we never will be. And that’s both good and bad. It’s bad in that we do not have a big budget to spend on advertising and cute commercials, etc. It’s good in that we’re not going to go out of business just because we’re not “profitable” or growing as fast as OS X in market share. We have and can and will outlast other OS’s and desktop environments that must be profitable to exist (OS/2, Amiga, BeOS, etc., etc.). And maybe that’s why we’ll finally succeed in continuing to gain market share. Or maybe we’ll get there by being stable and good enough for most users and having applications which live on the  Internet being more important than applications that are written for Linux (Google OS, perhaps?). And maybe we’ll still not get there for another decade. Or longer. But that’s not the point, really, is it? I mean, it would be REALLY nice to never hear “oh, we’re just not even going to bother doing XXX on Linux, but that’s okay because Linux doesn’t matter… heck, it’s only .05% of our sales anyway!” again. But we’re here because we like what we have and we like where we’re going and we like controlling our destiny. I totally get that. And maybe that’s good enough.
4. OS X really does have some nice apps that Linux has no counterparts for, but for me, there are not that many (Tweetie comes to mind) and the good news is that we (Desktop Linux) can fix that ourselves (and we are). One of the big things that people point to in this whole OS discussion is that OS X has more polished apps than Linux. And I must agree with this. But I think the reason is less because of OS superiority and more the nature of apps on OS X. Developers actually make money selling software on OS X *shock*, so they have a vested interest in polish and user experience, and spend a lot more time on it than Linux projects typically do. Heck, they even pay people to help make their apps polished and highly usable. The good news is that we’re in control of our own destiny here and can do (and are doing) better.
5. We’ve come a long way (baybee), and I think we’re on the right track. It’s pretty amazing to think how far we’ve come in the last decade. It seems only yesterday that Blackbox and Bbkeys were the coolest thing in the world to me, and that the big Linux Desktop Environment projects just were nowhere as fun, exciting, or good-looking. We’ve come a long way since then. I’ve always preferred KDE to GNOME, but both DE’s have made HUGE improvements–both to the core Desktop Linux technologies that we share and to UI and polish and usability on top of those technologies. KDE4 has not even been out for 2 years already and the difference between what we have now compared to what we had 2 years ago is phenomenal. I absolutely agree with the sentiment that Desktop Linux is now, more than ever, ready for the world to use and ready for 3rd party developers to start writing for. I think this should drive us to be even that much more cautious as we push out new distributions and make sure we don’t break stuff just because we want something new and shiny.
6. I haven’t left, nor do I plan to, Desktop Linux (I know, who cares), but I think it’s important to think about what might be broken in our development model and figure out how to fix it, else we’re shooting ourselves in the collective foot and preventing all our hard work from reaching beyond our little geekly communities into more mainstream adoption, and that would be truly sad.
7. This MacBook Pro still has problems with Linux and that sucks, but also not our fault… sorta. And I’ll figure out how to work around all of them and so can you. As an example, as I’ve been typing this blog post, I have brushed the touchpad about 10 million times accidentally and ended up clicking somewhere entirely else, and in general disrupting my work by having to keep undoing the garbage that just happened. And yes, I’ve added a HAL fdi file to enable SHMConfig and tweaked syndaemon and synclient and yes, I know I need to still do more. But here’s the point: this does not happen in OS X. It just works. It would sure be swell if we could figure out how to make this work out of the box for Linux users. Similarly, suspend seems to work just fine, but I’ve had several issues with X/keyboard/mouse stability upon resuming. Not surprising, being that Apple hasn’t tried to make sure that its hardware works well with Linux. But annoying all the same.

Anyway, life is good, and I have a new puzzle to figure out (this MacBook Pro). =:)

So, I’ve realized that I need to buy a personal laptop for a while now but have been putting it off because it’s expensive and a big ordeal. I don’t do anything that involves money quickly or lightly, so kicking down a big wad o’ cash for a laptop is not something that I can just do whenever I feel like it. For the last few months, I’ve been agonizing over what I should get and researching and pricing and comparing. I knew that I wanted something that stood out and looked good and felt good and was well-built. I’ve been using ThinkPads as my main laptop for the last decade or so, since it’s what my employers have provided me, and while they’re sturdy as heck and are well built and last forever, they’re not really all that sexy. I wanted sexy.

I also knew that I wanted some nice features that Apple provides stock that most of the other guys do not. Such as a backlit laptop keyboard. I was playing around with the idea of getting a Dell E6500, but 1) not horribly sexy and 2) that requires me to get a 15″ screen. Which is another thing I wanted… to not feel like I’m lugging around an Encyclopedia every time I take my laptop with me somewhere. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using an Asus Eee PC 1005HA netbook for this reason and while I absolutely loved the battery life on the little guy and the portability, the absolutely diminutive screen size is what finally did me in. Well, that and the horribly slow CPU. And the horribly slow GPU. And the really small keyboard size. And the fact that it doesn’t have an optical drive. And the crappy ath9k wifi drivers that keep disconnecting.

So I bought a Mac. Spent a bunch of time before then reading up on whether the MacBook Pros can play nicely with Linux (model 5,5 is what I ended up getting), and felt pretty comfortable that a MBP could be a really nice Linux machine. After waffling and being generally unsure of which one I wanted to get, I finally decided on a 13″ 2.26 Ghz MBP. I knew I wanted a smaller screen size than my previous PowerBook of 15″ and my current work laptop which also has a 15″ screen. So 13″ fits the bill nicely. I was really unsure about the CPU and was really hesitant to get a 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP, thinking that it’d be not all that much faster than the T7500  @ 2.20GHz Core 2 Duo I have in my work Thinkpad, but as it turns out, the 2.26 Ghz CPU in the MBP is really nice and fast–feels faster than the Thinkpad. Also, upgraded the RAM from 2 GB to 4 GB and I left the 160 GB drive in, planning on replacing it with a 250 GB 7200 HDD that I already have or maybe even a SSD if they ever get cheap enough.

I spent probably 6 hours or so on Sunday night getting Linux installed onto my shiny new MBP. Installing Linux was the easy part. Getting rEFIT to recognize it and boot into it was something completely else. Turns out that rEFIT does not play nicely at ALL with Grub2 (which is what Ubuntu Karmic comes with), so one of the things I did at the end that got it to work nicely was to boot off the live CD, install Karmic, chroot into my newly installed Karmic partition, uninstall Grub2, install Grub 0.97, and that seemed to do the trick nicely. The other hiccups I had were around getting the MBP’s drive partitioned in a way that OS X and rEFIT could deal with. I ended up resizing the main OS X partition and creating MS-DOS partitions from inside OS X’s disk utility and then just formatted them from the Ubuntu Karmic install process. But now I have a really nicely working OS X and Ubuntu Karmic dual-boot MacBook Pro. I realize my details are pretty sketchy here, so if you’re interested in more details, let me know and I’ll provide more info.

Since my day job allows me to write code for Linux (and don’t get me wrong, this is the best job I have EVER had and have never been happier), I occasionally need to use Skype to teleconference into meetings. And at least five times over the last 2 days, right in the middle of a Skype meeting from my Ubuntu Jaunty Linux laptop, things totally stop working. Sometimes the audio stops working entirely and I can’t hear the people on the other end anymore. Sometimes the video freezes. Sometimes Skype totally locks up the USB webcam and I have to kill -9 it and unplug/replug the webcam. Sometimes I can’t even see video on it at all and all I can see is a black box. Sometimes, it even works as it should and I don’t have problems (but those times are rather few and far between).

So, here’s my rant. I’m sick and tired of this crap in Linux. I have been a VERY vocal proponent of Linux everywhere for more than a decade. I’ve pushed it in every company I’ve worked for. I’ve insisted on using it everywhere personally. I have been searching for a job that would let me actually program on and for Linux for a long time and I now have one (YAY!). But I am absolutely exhausted of things that work on other platforms being unreliable, crappy, non-performant, crash-prone, and in general totally second rate or worse in Linux. In this particular instance, I unplugged my USB webcam from my Linux Thinkpad, plugged it into my new MacBook Pro, installed Skype and was up and running in no time. Skype did not crash, hang, hiccup, freeze, mutilate, spindle, or in any other way be anything other than an awesome application in OS X. And, as an aside, just looking through the preferences section for Skype showed that it was obviously given more love and care than the Linux version. And ya know what? I’m tired of it. I’m tired of even having to think about it. I’m tired of having to apologize for stupid stuff like this, get to a shell and killall -9 it. Or try to figure out what stupidity is causing it to happen. Or try to find workarounds so that PulseAudio can not screw things up for me. Or have to check my xorg.conf to see if I might have enabled something that is causing the bizarre Xv errors Skype spews every once in a while. I’m just tired of it.

Now, the focus of my frustration in this case is Skype. And I know that without even a moment’s hesitation, 90% of you are going to say “oh well, see, that’s what you get when you used a closed-source application! just use Open Source and everything will be better!” And to that I say: bollocks. You’d be hard-pressed to find a bigger Open Source advocate than me. But that’s not the point here. And that’s not the true issue at hand here. Open Source is great. Open Source is cool. Open Source is a whole heck of a lot of fun. Open Source is the answer to a whole lot of problems! But of this I am absolutely certain: it is not the answer to this problem. In this particular instance, and in millions more like it, all across the world, every day, people are going to need to run software that IS NOT OPEN SOURCE. You can try all you want to create the best, most awesome Open Source project to meet a given need, but you will never 100% fill every closed-source software solution need. You might get close. You might even have something that is “good enough”. But the bottom line is that there’s always going to be some piece of software that you have to run that you don’t have the source for. At least, this is true in the world that I’ve lived in for the last decade+.

Now, I am very aware that the Linux Desktop is SO much better than it was even 5 years ago. We have eye candy up the wahzoo. We even have some better applications from commercial companies. Heck, we even had the awesome World of Goo game (which I actually paid money for and LOVE)! We have much more feature-rich FOSS applications and desktop environments than we’ve ever had before. But what we don’t have is a stable platform that companies can count on being able to invest into and reap monetary rewards from. Yeah, like it or not, this is the real world and companies have to make money to stay in business.

We are a bunch of hackers. We love to tinker, to fiddle, to break compatibility in a heartbeat just for the outside chance that it might be better, to change quickly, and to do whatever we feel like. And that’s all fantastic stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re our own worst enemies. What makes Desktop Linux so awesome and fun and cool and quickly evolving is the same thing that keeps companies from investing in us–and even when they do, we end up breaking their stuff and causing Linux Desktop users grief. And we show absolutely zero possibility that this is going to improve any time soon. PulseAudio? Really? I’m so glad it’s the new hotness and is technically awesome. Your new hotness just broke an app I absolutely have to rely on. Guess how much I give a crap about your new hotness now, hm?

Anyway, I don’t have a solution to this. All I know is that I’m really liking my MacBook Pro, and I’m really liking OS X. Is it free? No. Is it Open Source? No. But does it just stinking work? Yeah, it really does. And it is such a drastic and refreshing change from the world of Desktop Linux that I am seriously wondering if I’m going to ever end up using that Ubuntu Karmic install I just slapped on the other partitions of this drive. I don’t think I’m yet ready to send out a jwz-like dissertation and farewell address, but I totally get it now. OS X is beautiful, and it just works. And I don’t think I’ll ridicule anyone for getting an Apple computer and actually using OS X on it ever again. Windows is still another story, but even there I can see what the allure is. You know… you get a computer to do stuff, and you want it to work. You don’t care what it has to do so that it works. You just want it to stinking work. Wouldn’t it be nice if Desktop Linux was like that?

[ UPDATE - 2009-11-20 ] – I’ve received a lot of really great comments on this post, but my initial intent at 1) venting/ranting, 2) comparing Desktop Linux to OS X, and 3) raising issues that I think we need to take a hard look at as a worldwide community were taken in a very different slant than I intended. FWIW, after having spent a week with my shiny little MacBook Pro, I am happily running Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 on it and have blogged again in an attempt to clear up some of the muddiness around this first post. To this end, I’m going to change the title from “I think I’m tired of Desktop Linux” to something less vitriolic for future viewers. And hopefully this won’t cause aggregators/planets to re-publish this. =:/

I can just feel the momentum behind us, can’t you?

If this were a corporation, right about now, you’d expect to see some old dude get up in front of everybody, work himself into a frenzy, run around on stage (“developers, developers, developers”?), and try to get everybody motivated to keep pushing hard at making our software the most awesomest, bestest, most stablest thing you could ever want.

But we’re not a corporation (thank God!!).

And we don’t have an old, sweaty, balding dude to put up on stage and try to whip everybody into being motivated (also, thank God!).

We just have us. And that is the magic of Open Source. It is up to us to keep our momentum going, to not give up, to keep pushing ourselves harder, to keep improving our software stack, to keep squashing bugs, to try to have the best desktop environment possible.

So keep up the awesome work, everybody. You’re doing it right!! =:)

Me (vanRijn), blauzahl, hays, and greeneg.

Thiago, Olivier, Frans, Simon, Ariya, Alex (blauzahl), Harri Porten, Andreas Pakulat, greeneg, me (vanRijn), hays, and Charles (njaard).

Me and Leo! Unfortunately, I was an idiot and this was the only shot I got of we two KDE GSOC mentors.

KDE threesome (Thiago, Jason, and Leo), plus the Qt foursome (Thiago, Ariya, Simon, and Olivier), meet the Android!! Oooooh, Aaaaaah! We’re not sure what the dog’s name is. =:/

That’s right. For back in these dark days, even mentioning that you used a mouse could get you in a whole mess o’ trouble. And so this theming thing that you kids *Fluffy Bunny plasma theme? harumph!* take so much for granted now was focused mainly on customizing your X terminal emulator. And I’m not even talking about bash or zsh prompts. I’m talking about cramming your ~/.Xdefaults full of xrdb lines to tweak the snot out of your terminal emulator so that it was the coolest kid on the block. For the simpletons, there was the stodgy old xterm. But soon, along came rxvt, aterm, and the brazen Eterm. We didn’t have these fancy tabbed terminal emulators that you kids have now. We had 300 terminal windows stacked carefully and neatly on our 640×480 screens, and we LIKED it! *harumph again*

And so it is with feelings of nostalgia and inner-geekly warmth that I have started using rxvt (urxvt now) again as of late (try as I might, I can’t find aterm or Eterm OpenSUSE 11 rpms??). For reasons I will not go into here, having mostly to do with the nVidia card I have on my laptop I’m told, I’ve been using urxvt for the last week with really good results. It has been a week, almost exactly (`grep Time: /var/log/Xorg.0.log`), since I’ve restarted X, and I’m not seeing any slowdowns or desktop-switching-slowness. I really like Eterm–especially the font pseudo-shadowing–but I can’t seem to get it to do transparency in KDE4. urxvt, however, actually does ARGB visual transparent backgrounds!! `man 7 urxvt` tells the whole tale, but here is my ~/.Xdefaults that I’m quite happy with:

urxvt.background: rgba:0000/0000/0000/ccdd
urxvt.foreground: white
!urxvt.font: -artwiz-fkp-medium-r-normal–16-160-75-75-m-80-iso8859-1
!urxvt.boldfont: -artwiz-fkp-medium-r-normal–16-160-75-75-m-80-iso8859-1
urxvt.font: xft:Terminus:pixelsize=14
urxvt.scrollBar_right: 1
urxvt.scrollBar_floating: 1
urxvt.saveLines: 10000
urxvt.internalBorder: 5
urxvt.depth: 32
urxvt.scrollTtyOutput: 0
urxvt.scrollTtyKeypress: 1
urxvt.color12: rgba:6666/6666/ffff/ffff

Anyway, I’m quite happy with how urxvt is looking and acting with this setup in my KDE4 trunk desktop. And besides, there’s something about stacking 10 rxvt windows vertically and being able to see the last few lines of output from each simultaneously. =;) Oh, and here’s a screenshot showing an urxvt terminal with true ARGB transparent background:

Nuts.

If I was made of money, I’d be sorely tempted now to go looking for a personal laptop to replace this frustrating hunk of Thinkpad with. New macbooks come out on Tuesday, no?

Holy crap. KDE 4.2 frickin’ flies! And contrary to my previous post, now if I set IPP=2, everything’s blazing fast and I’m actually able to resize konsole again! WooooooT!!!  YAY progress!!!

[[ UPDATE ]] : Added link to my previous post. I had already posted my xorg.conf settings and since then, the only thing I’ve changed was IPP=2 from IPP=1. HTH!

This is a screenshot from within the Xephyr session, showing the 1600×1200 Xephyr display. The cool thing is that using ksnapshot from within the Xephyr session will actually capture the entire display, not just what fits on your host display. This is important for me because my laptop LCD display is only 1680×1050, so I can’t actually fit the entire Xephyr display inside my real physical display. Nice to know, definitely, since this means that I can create a monstrous Xephyr display that doesn’t fit inside my actual host display and still get full-display snapshots out of it. So what you see here is a KDE3 session spanning all 4 Xinerama heads. Kicker correctly only spans head 1. VMware Workstation is on head 2, in full-screen mode, but only full-screened on the second head. It can span more than 1 head as I’ll show further down.

To achieve this, I downloaded seli’s fakexinerama library, compiled it in ~/build/ like this:

gcc -O2 -Wall Xinerama.c -fPIC -o libXinerama.so.1.0 -shared
ln -s libXinerama.so.1.0 libXinerama.so.1
ln -s libXinerama.so.1 libXinerama.so

I then copied the real /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0 to /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0.real (make sure you backup your library!) and set up an alias in my ~/.profile so that I can easily switch on and off this fake xinerama library. When I start up my real host session, I don’t want to be using fakexinerama, but when I launch my Xephyr session for multimon development, I do need it to be there.

xin () {
if [ "$1" = "real" ]
then
sudo cp /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0.real /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0
elif [ "$1" = "fake" ]
then
sudo cp ~/builds/libXinerama.so.1.0 /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1.0.0
else
echo “real or fake?”
fi
}

Here’s the contents of my ~/.fakexinerama config file:

#Configuration file ~/.fakexinerama
#
# The format of the file is rather strict. Lines beginning with # are comments. First line is one
# number, specifying number of screens. This line must be followed by this number of lines, each
# containing four numbers: X Y W H, i.e. screen’s X and Y origin, width and height.
4
0 0 800 600
800 0 800 600
0 600 800 600
800 600 800 600

This establishes a 2×2 4-head xinerama configuration. Next up is creating the Xephyr display. From within your regular host session:

Xephyr :2.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 1600×1200 &
xterm -display :2&

You should now have a single Xephyr screen that’s 1600×1200 pixels with an xterm running inside of it. Now switch focus to the new xterm window and turn on the fakexinerama library and start up a KDE3 session:

xin fake
startkde
# (and when you’re done with this little environment, make sure you return your system to sanity by running “xin real”)

That’s about it. Really cool stuff. One last little screenshot… This one shows VMware Workstation spanning multiple heads. This obviously works with real external monitors as well. The way it works is by clicking the little monitor button to the right of the “View” menu. This tells Workstation to cycle through the available display topologies. So, on first press, Workstation spread across all 4 heads (fullscreen multimonitor, largest topology). Second press took on this configuration that I screengrabbed (vertical span). Third press spread Workstation horizontally across the first 2 heads. And then 4th press returned Workstation to just fullscreen on head 2 (where I started it from).

One last thought on the subject… One of the things I’m hopefully going to be able to work on in the next couple of months is implementing the new EWMH _NET_WM_FULLSCREEN_MONITORS hint in various X window managers. Currently, Workstation does some internal gyrations to convince window managers to allow our undecorated fullscreen window to maximize over multiple monitors/heads. _NET_WM_FULLSCREEN_MONITORS was the hint that was recently added to the EWMH spec to correctly accomplish this, but as far as I know, it hasn’t been added to any window managers yet. I’m excited about getting the chance to get up to speed on some window manager internals again! It’s been a while since I’ve last had the chance to do that (bbkeys/blackbox days of yore!).

Anyway, hope this helps someone else set up a multi-head dev/test environment, should the need arise. =:)

Finally!! I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this for a while now. Namely, I need to be able to test multiple display stuff out in Linux and being that I use my laptop pretty much exclusively for development, and I don’t have mulitple physical monitors handy at home (and certainly not whilst travelling), I’ve been thus far unable to test anything multi-head-ish. But, thanks to Xdmx and Xephyr, this is now possible.

Xephyr :3.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 600×400 &
Xephyr :4.0 -ac -br +xinerama -screen 600×400 &
Xdmx :5 -display localhost:3 -display localhost:4 +xinerama
export DISPLAY=:5
openbox&
xterm&

So, the first 2 lines start up X-within-X displays on localhost:3 and localhost:4. The third line starts up the distributed multi-head X server, Xdmx, and tells it to use 2 displays (the two Xephyr displays started in lines 1 and 2) as the back ends. The fourth line exports a new DISPLAY variable (:5 — the Xdmx uber-display) that openbox and xterm both use. The screenshot shows my 1200×400 Xinerama 2-head X session, with the xterm dragged half-way between the two heads.

There are still some things that I need to figure out with this. Moving the mouse between the virtual heads is a little wonky (read: doesn’t work?). But at least, this is a promising beginning of what feels like a really cool answer to this problem. Anyone else have any insight to add to this? Any thoughts on how to get the mouse to behave sanely between virtual heads (which are actually X windows on my host)?