Quick note about multiple monitors

[Davide Bolcioni]

Greetings,
skimming the following

  <http://design.canonical.com/2011/12/improving-the-multi-monitor-experience-
in-ubuntu/>

rang a bell about how I have seen a similar problem solved differently and 
which I feel could be useful for Fedora. The original solution, on Solaris 2.5 
era Ultra workstations, was:

1 - all monitors turned on using DPMS
2 - all monitors are numbered 1 - n and matched to screens
3 - on all screens draw a set of rectangles showing all monitors
4 - highlight which is which

Using ASCII art each monitor would show something like this

  +------------------------+--------------------+----------------+
  |                        |                    |                |
  |                        |                    |                |
  |                        |                    |        3       |
  |                        |         2          |                |
  |           1            |                    |                |
  |                        |                    |----------------+
  |                        |                    |
  |                        |--------------------+
  |                        |
  +------------------------+

on monitors 1, 2 and 3 with the number appearing white on the correct monitor 
and gray on others, e.g. on monitor 1 number 1 would be bright white while 2 
and 3 would be gray. All rectangles also tracked the mouse with a crosshair
so the user knew on which monitor the mouse could be found.

The above was engineered through extensive rework of the System V scripts, 
since IIRC some monitors had to be driven by a card specific X server and 
there was an X proxy providing :0.0 on top of those.

Nowadays step (1) would probably have to be more discerning because of LVDS 
but the general principle seems sound to me. Furthermore, instead of numbers, 
F-logo bitmaps could be shown, arranged as follows

          F     F       F 
  F  FF  F F   F F    F   F
                F      F F

using bright colors in the appropriate rectangle and bland colors in others.

A side thought, since I'm currently studying systemd: how difficult would it 
be to pull a stunt like the above on a systemd driven system like Fedora ? In 
theory, it still supports System V scripts so I "just" have to turn off or 
replace everything which conflicts.

Davide Bolcioni
-- 
There is no place like /home.