Panning / Creating a bigger virtual screen.

[David Griffith]

> I'm sorry I don't have anything to offer on this, except to request
> that the Xorg developers bring back Virtual capability before the
> next release of Xorg. I think this is an important and frequently
> used feature.
>   
It's certainly important enough for me to try and sort out the black art 
that is X programming, anyway :-)

The previous util for the eeePC - that mine is based upon - directly 
manipulates the framebuffer location via the GPU registers and it 
doesn't play nicely with X/hardware cursors as a result. Obviously, it 
also doesn't work on different hardware.

I only have the one PC to test on, but seeing as all the util uses is 
Xlib, the xf86vidmode extension and randr to re-jig the screen size, it 
should work for anyone else as well. Which is why I'm trying to make it 
look a bit less hackish. If I can sort it out, I'll let it into the 
wild, and all the X dev's can breathe a sigh of relief as they won't be 
continually pestered by confused users wondering why they dropped a 
useful feature from X.

As it is, my util does work at the moment, it just seems to be a bit of 
a hack having to create a new mode and switch to it, just to get a 
bigger virtual desktop. Surely there's a way of telling the server that 
the root window is now x by y pixels - randr obviously does it when it 
rejigs the screen to fit a few different-sized monitors in. I guess I'll 
have to go code-trawling and hope that it's relatively simple.

Cheers,
Dave