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.