RandR support for Xvfb

Alan Coopersmith Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM
Wed May 27 06:32:34 PDT 2009


Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> I believe Antoine was asking with an eye towards use with 'xpra',
> which is a sort of rootless VNC equivalent that plays some tricks with
> compositing on a headless server (http://partiwm.org/wiki/xpra). So
> using Xvnc would be somewhat silly, but then, there are worse things
> than silliness. I haven't run into any particular bugs in Xvfb (well,
> except for not supporting RandR), so I didn't realize Xvnc was better
> maintained, but if so...

The 90% of Xvfb code that's shared with Xorg is well maintained, the Xvfb
ddx layer itself doesn't get that much attention.   As for Xvnc, it depends
on which Xvnc you use - RealVNC's is basically unmaintained now, but TigerVNC
seems to be doing well for a new project, and TightVNC & TurboVNC are still
alive as well.

> Alan: Is there any way for a regular user to spawn a headless Xorg
> process using those modules? Reading the man page did not give me much
> hope, but I'm not sure if I'm missing something (e.g., Xorg -showopts
> just segfaults on my machine).

Unfortunately, choosing which modules to load is restricted to root, since
Xorg is setuid root, so a admin would have to set it up for them.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering




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