Testing out a second monitor

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I’ve spent the last hour or so of the afternoon testing out using a second screen with my laptop. And here’s the email I’ve just sent round the office list as a subtle request for a second monitor of my own:

OK, having now found the DVI adapter widget for my laptop, I’ve been trying out using Pete’s flat panel monitor as a second display for the laptop. And I’ve decided that you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands if you want it back! (Or at least order me one, too!) Being able to have Firefox open permanently on the second screen — either showing the MM screen I’m working with, or documentation — while I’ve got my text editor open on the laptop’s screen is just wonderful. The mouse is taking a bit of getting used to — since the second screen is up and to the right a bit spatially, I keep dragging down and left to bring the cursor back to my laptop, where it should just be left, but I’m sure I can learn to cope with these things… :-) 
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Graeme Mathieson                         tel:+44-131-2735133
Plone/Zope/Python Software Engineer      http://www.logicalware.com/
Logicalware Ltd, Stuart House, Eskmills, mailto:mathie@logicalware.com
Station Road, Musselburgh, EH21 7PQ, UK

Ooh, yeah, it’s shiny. It is how I work at home, really, though in that instance its with two computers. In some ways this is even better: with two computers, you have to switch keyboard/mouse and you don’t have a shared pasteboard. (Well, actually, I suppose you do, you just have to do pbpaste | ssh otherhost pbcopy in between the copy and paste. :-) ) I think I might have to try and convince Annabel that we really need a new flat panel monitor at home too…

I had wondered if my PowerBook would actually do the second monitor thing. I know some do, and some only do mirroring. But yes, for the record, the 17″ PowerBook G4 does support a second monitor that shows independent stuff. It’s a Dell E173FP I’ve got it connected to just now, which Pete ordered for his PC a week or so ago.

4 thoughts on “Testing out a second monitor”

  1. Cool.

    I run a Twin PC/Twin monitor setup using a piece of software called Synergy (http://sourceforge.net/projects/synergy2), which gives you both desktops that are controllable from a single mouse and keyboard.

    The advantage with doing it this way is that each desktop has a full PC’s resources behind it – if you start a program on one desktop you know that it’ll be run on that computer and will hence get it’s full resources dedicated to it. No slowdown for running Firefox on one desktop and DivX on the other…

    Mike

  2. MIke: stunning! It works on Mac OS X too! I’m using it just now between my laptop and my desktop at home. And it’s working really well. Sometimes it feels like it’s a bit laggy with typing, but it’s a lot better than I’d have expected (and I’m used to typing over laggy ssh sessions anyway). And you’re right: that way I get the power of the two full machines, which is nice (particularly when you add things like distcc into the mix).

    Thanks for the pointer. :-)

  3. No worries.

    It’ll even work cross platform – stick a Win32 box next to a Mac and a Linux box and you can “share” the desktops across all three.

    I’ve never seen any lag problems with my two WinXPPro boxes, are you using wired or wireless connections?

    Mike

  4. Pingback: Notes from a messy desk » Blog Archive » Using Synergy