Quote:
Originally Posted by franzli
Hi, as the discussion turned more on the (X) server side, I was winding of one of you might have a hint for a problem I can across when trying to use an Onyx Note (probably Likebook Mars would have same issue) in a dual screen setup with a slightly exotic little handheld device running Linux, the Gemini PDA. This runs Linux (sort of) natively, but the display drivers seem to be somehow android based, as xrandr just shows "hwcomposer".
My problem is that I haven't been able to get a Virtual1 head/output accessible via xrandr in order to get a secondary display output of the same virtual screen, which I could then pump into the VNC server.
I fiddled around in the xorg.conf a but, but that usually ended up breaking the internal screen display when nothing was connected, as it was pulling out the whole virtual screen even at the login screen.
There's a sketch of what I'm after here: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=35503
A potential limitation of the Gemini PDA is that it's got no mouse-like device, hence my hope to run i3 and control most things via keyboard.
This is not something I actively look for any more, as I've found another, more powerful little device that might suit my requirements better, but it would still be nice to get something running in the Gemini.
So the short question is, can anyone think of a way that I could get a VIRTUAL1 (or other dummy) head show up in xrandr -without it being used by default (so as to avoid the display issues I had when hard coding stuff into xorg.conf), but making it available when I choose to? |
I'm not entirely sure what you are asking, you want to create a second screen that only exists in memory? this is possible with vncserver/Xvnc. You can then remote into it and have it display on the device with a vnc client. It is not hardware accelerated though. You can also use x11vnc that just mirrors the main X server running. Hope that helps. If you are a german speaker (somehow your forumname makes me believe that, sorry if not) you can write me a PM and ask again in german, as I am a native speaker.
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I got vncserver/Xvnc running natively on the Boox Max2 inside termux, and even set up fluxbox and aterm to run locally. Graphics are not hardware accelerated of course but a lot more stable than XSDL XServer (which is not hardware accelerated either) As of optimization, tigervncs Xvnc already does everything as optimal as possible, what you can add is disabling all connection encryption which is not necessary locally and I could imagine helps a little bit. After trying to compile Xvnc locally (and even making good progress) I found out that termux has an official x11-repo that actually has all these programs ready already. D'oh! The command line parameter I used was
Xvnc -localhost :0 -SecurityTypes=None -geometry 1650x2200 (portrait)
you could also try to set up an entire linux distribution inside of termux and prooting into it, there would be a performance hit though, even though I'm not sure how big. All this makes me wonder if you could theoretically kill surfaceflinger and run an normal Xserver in it's place, even if only with fbdev maybe, but you'd eventually want to replace the init files with your own custom stuff, which would require permanent root to make it not mindbogglingly frustrating to set up. I actually have the same SoC the Max 2 has on an ARM development board and hardware acceleration is not exciting with the Mali GPU it has anyways, at least not with purebred linux.
Not sure if it's worth the effort to run a "purebred" linux instead of android. Android does have some apps you'd want to use (like for the Wacom pen and pdf viewing) and the vnc method can run most linux programs you'd reasonably run on what's essentially a monochrome-screened device with very low framerate anyways. It doesn't even make much sense to use X terminal emulation, as Termux is arguably more fitting and has less overhead. (You can still get window management with dvtm, screen or tmux)
Anyways, these were my findings! (so far)
EDIT: added geometry paramater