Mission Control
June 10th, 2009
In case you haven’t noticed, there is a pretty common theme among geeks: “Because I can.”
One of the things I was looking forward to in Fedora 11 is better support for dual monitors. I wasn’t disappointed, the UI is very intuitive and it just worked, allowing me to share my laptop screen onto a spare monitor (seriously, I have too much hardware just lying around). So my home office now looks like:
Something else to realize is that with my synergy setup, a single mouse/keyboard is used to control both systems, meaning I can move the mouse from the leftmost side of the laptop to the rightmost side of the right monitor, an act that currently requires me to pick the mouse up to get more space 6 times (yes, I actually counted).
Not sure how long I’ll try this setup out; I’m guessing I’ll have a wicked headache before lunch. But that doesn’t change the fact that my office looks like a NOC right now.
bbuckingham
June 10th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Nice setup Jay ! (/me needs to get my systems upgraded to F11
)
Ryan Rix
June 10th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
How do you share the mouse with both computers?
Jay
June 10th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Ryan – Synergy. It’s an open source app that lets you have one or more machines connect to the one with the keyboard/mouse and effectively treat the other machines like an extended monitor. You can even copy/paste between multiple machines.
I did a quick write up on configuring it, it’s pretty simple: http://noopenblockers.com/2009/05/18/synergy-on-fedora-10/
Peter
June 11th, 2009 at 1:58 am
Strange thing, I have always been more comfortable with two or more boxes displaying application windows on one monitor than one box displaying its windows on multiple monitors, it just looks weird and slows me down instead of increasing my productivity.
I use dual monitor only to display movies on the bigger 24 inches monitor so everybody can watch it while I do my work on the small laptop monitor (thinkpad X61s – indeed the best one I have got ever).
JamesD
June 11th, 2009 at 5:31 am
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
Jay
June 11th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Peter – I am pretty similar actually. I’ll usually run a DVD in the corner of one (music gets old as background noise). But I do find the multiple monitors useful for times where I have my IDE, browser, and tails of log files so I can see all of them at once.