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I'm setting up a space for a group at school where we can do meetings and presentations. We have a few large displays that I would like to be easily usable over the network. We already have a server that we can use to host the displays.

The solution I envision would be a collection of scripts that users could run which would make the displays appear to be attached to the local machine (so users could e.g. drag windows from their machine over to the display). I know that X is supposed to be network transparent so I think this should be possible, but I've had some difficulty figuring out exactly how I would get this to work.

We only have a small number of trusted users on our network, so security and resource management are not primary concerns right now.

From what I can see, most walkthroughs on the internet involve tunnelling X over ssh, but I'd like (if possible) the displays to be able to show applications running on the local machine, like I talked about earlier. Does anyone know of any good resources out there that can help me accomplish what I am looking for?

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  • You are talking about opening a program on one computer, and "dragging" it to another computer. It doesn't work like that! Or having a display that does some kind of merge/overlay between two computers display outputs! Also you use the expression "server hosting a display" i'm not sure if that's a technical thing you're talking about that I haven't heard of, or something that makes no sense! Computers output to a display port, and you connect a display and get the output.
    – barlop
    May 19, 2015 at 16:00
  • You can drag a window around one computer between displays. Or move/drag a file(not a window) from one computer to another..A display just shows what is on a computer. Displays don't have any special intelligence to mix and match what is on different computers.u can do some clever things with multiple computers one display,or one computer multiple displays..But they don't involve the display having a life of its own. When the computer goes wrong, somebody might have the instinct to punch the display,but if anything, it's the computer box itself that he should punch.
    – barlop
    May 19, 2015 at 16:08
  • I don't expect monitors to have minds of their own. I just believed that with a network aware protocol such as X it would be possible to in essence "share" a display in the same way that we can share compute resources, filesystems, etc.
    – Robert Mason
    May 19, 2015 at 16:11
  • You can have one display multiple computers and a switch that switch that switches which computer is being displayed. The network equivalent might be a person at the central computer with the display, VNCing to each computer they want to view. And then switching between the computers, so as to show the one they want to view. But to merge/overlay each computer's screens into one, nah.
    – barlop
    May 19, 2015 at 16:17

1 Answer 1

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With X your apps should run on user machines with DISPLAY env var pointing your machine with X server. In this case apps will be displayed there.

SSH X forwarding sets this variable for SSH session, so you may connect by SSH to your user machine and forward its X to your machine with display.

I am not sure if it is possible to extend one desktop between user machine and display machine. But your users may run X server locally (with DISPLAY pointing to localhost) and switch it to your "display machine" if they want to show presentation .

Or they may always run them locally and then use VNC from Display Machine to their machines to share their screen.

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  • How does DISPLAY setting interact with HIDs? It uses the target machine's, correct?
    – Robert Mason
    May 19, 2015 at 16:05
  • Do you mean keyboard and mouse? they are also connected to server as well as monitor. So, when I click mouse button, server sends command to client (application) telling "user clicked button!". And client (application) says "draw circle then!" and server draws circle on screen. Server works with keyboard, mouse and monitor. It is some kind of terminal. And application (client) connects to server. The funniest part here is that server may be weak machine: it only need to draw on screen and client is powerful machine: it needs CPU and memory to run programs)
    – user996142
    May 19, 2015 at 16:13

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