Attaching remote display at runtime?

[Nathaniel Smith]

Florian Echtler <floe <at> butterbrot.org> writes:
> after some experimentation with Xdmx today, I was wondering if there is 
> _any_ way, through some bizarre combination of Xdmx and/or RandR 1.2,
> to attach a remote X display on a different machine to a running X server?

Depends on what you mean by "attach" (and what you are trying to accomplish).

If you want to have two machines sitting next to each other, with a monitor
attached to each, and then have a "single X server" running on both monitors,
then you want DMX.  (I think.)

If you have an X display running on some computer that is far away from you, and
you want to peek at its screen and control its mouse using your local screen and
mouse, then you want something like x11vnc or vino running on the remote system,
and then a VNC client of your choice running on your local system.  The VNC
client will pop up a window that contains an image of the whole remote screen.

If you want to run some applications on a remote system, but interact with them
locally like normal applications, then the simplest thing is just standard X
forwarding, like ssh -X gives you.  If you have a slower network, or you want
the applications to survive even if your network connection goes down or you
switch machines, or whatever, then as the other reply says you might want to try
xpra.

Hope that helps,
-- Nathaniel
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