Saturday, June 07, 2014

4096x4096 framebuffer on X windows VM

I've been doing a lot of Linux development on a Virtual Machine (ESX) recently and figured it would be nice to leverage the virtual VGA adapter to produce a 4096x4096 X resolution on my Xubuntu install.

There are two ways I utilise this massive desktop, one way is just using the scrollbars on the console view to facilitate my development environment with loads of terminal windows / etc. The other way is to stack three laptops side by side, each running VSphere client and each having a console open to the same VM instance, thereby creating a super wide "remoted" monitor session (with three keyboards/mice too!). You could even add a second or third monitor to each laptop and have a total of six / nine screens to better make use of the super extended vertical aspect (budget permitting of course ;-)).

Here are the command lines I used to coerce X windows into 4096x4096:

$ xrandr --newmode 4096x4096_60 1460.75 4096 4464 4920 5744 4096 4099 4109 4239 -hsync +vsync

$ xrandr --addmode Virtual1 4096x4096_60

The 4096x4096 mode will now be available in your display properties.

FYI the modeline was generated using the cvt tool:

$ cvt 4096 4096 60

Friday, June 06, 2014

Free digital certificates

A colleague of mine kindly pointed me to http://www.startssl.com as a source of FREE digital certificates. Fill your boots...