[openbox] Openbox focus on dualhead system

David Anderson david.anderson at calixo.net
Sat Sep 25 21:57:21 EDT 2004


Hi,

Kacper Wysocki wrote:
> According to Ben, adding this functionality would require such a  
> massive rewrite that it was just plain not worth it. Use xinerama or  
> switch window managers. OB3 is simply unaware of multiple instances of  
> itself, and would sometimes cause race conditions.

Thanks for the info. I'll try to see if I can't trick the two openboxes 
into cooperating through the use of Synergy (originally designed to join 
screens on different machines, but perhaps it could be used locally)

> I must add that Xinerama support in openbox is near excellent, and even  
> though I used to prefer non-Xinerama, I have now grown accustomed to  
> it. Of course, if you rely on DRI then this is not an option (unless  
> newer versions of x.org or xfree4.4 support dri+xinerama).

My problem is a little more subtle.
I am running one head on a Geforce 4 MX440 card, and the other on an ATI 
RageII+DVD PCI. The latter won't go above 1024x768x16, so if I use 
xinerama I must set the Geforce head to 16bpp as well. That shouldn't be 
a problem, except that it seems that in 16bpp the opengl drivers can't 
use a stencil buffer, which essentially prevents using many higher end 
3D applications. I discovered the problem when trying to run the Crystal 
Space 3D engine: each time I tried starting a CS application, I got a 
warning saying that GLX initialisation had failed and that CS was 
reverting to software rendering.

As I use 3D stuff fairly often, I decided to have the best of both 
worlds: two screens, but managed separately so that I can set the 
Geforced screen to 24bpp depth and have full accelerated GLX. Hopefully 
I'll be able to get hold of a video board that manages dualscreen 
natively (a slightly higher end geforce maybe), which'd make the problem 
go away.

> You could also disable focus-follows-mouse, but for me that was never  
> an option. I just use a clone mode layout when I need DRI.

Not an option for me. I'm far to used to it.

Thanks for the information,
David Anderson



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