Mutliple users using same desktop?

[Deron Johnson]

Xavier Bestel wrote:

>On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 10:04 -0500, Alex Deucher wrote:
>  
>
>>If you have multiple pointers you could have multiple users each with
>>a pointer sharing the same desktop. The "multi-seat" stuff just
>>provides multiple user specific desktops, not a shared desktop.
>>    
>>
>
>Really my dream desktop is a combination of both:
>- each user has its own desktop, possibly (but optionaly) on its own
>  machine
>- each user can make "incursions" on some other desktop, "steal" a
>  window, "give" another one (i.e. a graphical "export DISPLAY").
>
>All this requires some kind of one-the-fly dmx, mpx, and xauth setting.
>Well, i don't know exactely what I'm talking about, but I know there are
>many great possibilities with Xorg that people will never make use of,
>because they involve complicated command lines or even reconfiguring and
>restarting the server. I'd love if my coworkers could just do a "knock-
>knock, can I go to your screen ?" with the mouse, and e.g. bring one of
>their terminal windows to my screen. Or do some VNC-like work, but
>without the remote display and without the pointer sharing (2 pointers).
>
>	Xav
>
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>  
>

This is exactly the type of application I need to build. Basically,
what I need to do is to allow a user to "publish" a window so it is
visible to remote users, so these remote users can subscribe to the
window and see a simulacrum of the window contents on their own
machines. This part is easy. The hard part is the ability to grant
input control of the window to a selected remote user.  This remote
user can send input events to the window and control it just like a
local user. Although the local user can no longer control the window
other windows on the local desktop can still be controlled by the
local user. The even harder part is that the remote user who is
controlling the window may not be running Linux (Windows or Mac). I've
done a lot of thinking about how to do this and I've tried coming up
with a way that is not invasive to the X server but unfortunately
modifying the X server is the only way I've thought of which meets all
the requirements. I think I've devised a low-footprint way to handle
this, but before I implement it I wanted to find out if anyone has
done any work in this area before.

Note: The solution I devised requires an X app to be "well behaved" in
the sense that it only manipulates the windows it creates and doesn't
mess around with windows belonging to other clients. I believe that
most X apps follow this rule. Is this a safe assumption?