> I'm hoping that someone out there might have some experience with
> getting a bunch of monitors (say, 9) to function as one logical display
> - a really big screen.
> I've been looking at the advice on sunsolve, (using Xinerama) and at
> best it is incomplete, offering as an example a paltry three display
> system.
> I'd be very interested in any experiences and/or advice I could get from
> anyone who has actually done this, even if the way they got it to work
> is somewhat arcane (actually, the more arcane the better!).
You can plug as much m64 framebuffers in an UltraSPARC as you want, see
http://www.belwue.de/aktivitaeten/projekte/SUN-SH-2-SUN-DH.html (in
german, use BableFish (http://www.thedaily.com/bablefish.altavista.html)
to translate it).
I'm working with three m64 framebuffers in my Ultra5 (one internal, 2
PCI cards) - you'll need more PCI slots if you want more heads... :-)
AFAIK Xinerama in Xsun is limited to max. 16 framebuffers; plain
Xservers build from X11R6.4pl3 source tree are limited to 3 screens -
but that's only a "variable" (#define) which can be increased within
seconds... :-)
Be sure that you have recent (better: the latest) Xsun patch for Solaris
2.7 (better: current Xsun patch for Solaris 2.8 as there is a fix for an
ugly performance problem when using Xinerama. "Traditional" MultiHead
(seperate screens, e.g. no single logical screen) works fine here :-)).
Other solutions:
1. AFAIK HP supports something called SLS - Single Logical Screen which
work even between different machines.
2. Step 1 above may be emulated by simple Xnest hacking. Xnest supports
multiple screens which are represented by windows (on an existing
Xserver, Xnest is XinX - X nested). In theory Xnest may be modified to
send these windows to seperate displays (assuming that these displays
have the _same_ properties (visuals, extensions, default depth and so
on...)).
----
Bye,
Roland
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