Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

Xinit/VNC hack

25October2004 [directLink] [linux]

Just installed VNC at home. Running the Windows server on our XPHome machine, and the client on my laptop - dual booting Win2K and Linux.

My laptop resolution is smaller than the desktop, so I wanted to get VNC to scrolling full-screen (displays 1024 of the 1280 at a time; when you nudge the edge with the mouse it scrolls to display the rest). But just:

vncviewer -fullscreen

didn’t do everything I wanted - scrolling wasn’t perfect, and it couldn’t interact properly with KDE, so I wanted it separate.

Did some hunting in the X11 documentation, eventually cracked it. Only takes one line, so you can do it as a shell script or just a shortcut from the desktop:

xinit /usr/bin/vncviewer -fullscreen -- /usr/X11R6/bin/X :1

The ‘:1’ bit specifies display number 1 (F8 key) (KDE is running on :0, F7). If you’re running any other X servers you could make it :2 instead. I think my machine allows about 4 instances of X, but I haven’t tested it all the way.

countdown to china

22October2004 [directLink] [france]

Finally got some details for departure - now the real countdown begins.

Flying Cathay Pacific too, which is a pleasant surprise; we were all expecting cattle-class in some rattly old veteran…

There’s now a countdown timer at the bottom of every page