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Using X and SVGAlib Concurrently?

Posted by Cliff on from the another-way-to-multi-head dept.

Walter Bell asks: "I have two video cards in my Linux PC, one of which has a TV out jack. I would like to connect the TV out jack to my color LCD panel and use it as a system status monitor (kind of like this), while I am running X on the other video card to serve as my desktop. Is it possible to use SVGAlib/GGI and X at the same time on two different video adapters? Right now I can switch between the two but only one of the adapters is active at a given time, depending on which virtual console is active. Is there a workaround?"

1 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Two instances of X by Walter+Bell · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That's the same kind of problem I ran into. You can have svgalib and X active at the same time, but only one has control of the console and only one video card gets output.

    I considered running two X instances (like what you want to do) but most TV out cards are less than friendly to X because of Macrovision "trade secrets." For my application, svgalib at 320x200 would be more than adequate and it will still work with TV out.

    I was considering hacking svgalib so that I can run it from within an xterm (currently it complains that it can't open the VGA console and dies), so that it issues the int10 calls to the video BIOS on the first card while the Xserver video card is unaffected. But I strongly suspect that this will cause a big problem if X dies or I otherwise need to switch virtual consoles, because the kernel will have no idea what state the video cards are in.

    Any ideas....? It *should* be doable.

    ~wally