Using WiFi to spread a display over multiple notebooks

Behold multidisplay, the platonic form of brilliant but arguably pointless technology. "It might help you with spreadsheets."

[#1 posted by Pixel , January 8, 2009 1:22 PM]

Being able to drag a window onto my roommate's laptop rather than having to either go over to the other room to show them something, or send them a link would be kinda cool. I can also see uses for meetings & other collaborations. But yeah, not really a *wow* kind of app.

[#2 posted by NoahApples , January 8, 2009 3:36 PM]

I think that's pretty neat!

[#3 posted by adralien , January 8, 2009 4:34 PM]

I think that's pretty cool, but how about just doing over Ethernet?

I'm a big fan of multiple monitors, but there are only so many video cards you can stuff in a box. (often just 1, so it has to be multi-head).

I'd like to have 4+ monitors for PDFs and specs, two of them can be in the main box and accelerated, and two can be slow on a separate cheapo PC.

I remember an Ethernet based Linux app years ago that almost did this, but I've never been able to figure it out since.

[#4 posted by Dean , January 8, 2009 5:02 PM]

Teleport for Mac has been around for a while and is quite easy to use: http://www.abyssoft.com/software/teleport/ and Synergy for Mac, Windows and Linux: http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

These do not let you move a window from one computer to the other though. You can move your mouse through and control it as though it were a second display, allowing you to type and use the clipboard. I love Teleport, and would use it more often if I had more desk space. I'd love to see something that let you move a window between computers.

[#5 posted by Anonymous , January 8, 2009 7:25 PM]

It isn't for noobs; but distributed multihead X has been doing something very similar over any(sufficently speedy) network connection for quite some time.

http://dmx.sourceforge.net/

[#6 posted by haineux , January 8, 2009 9:09 PM]

My old pal V Michael Bove of the MIT Media Lab directed some research in this area.

Here's his group web site: http://obm.media.mit.edu/

The project falls under "Collaborating Input-Output Ecosystems"

Here's a paper you can read: http://web.media.mit.edu/~vmb/papers/Paper05Pages45-51.pdf

[#7 posted by Anonymous , January 9, 2009 9:19 AM]

Been able to do this with Xwindows over any networking technology for at least a decade.

It's never been easy, though, until very recently.

Still not grandma-friendly, unless your grandma is Grace Hopper.

[#8 posted by adralien , January 9, 2009 11:32 AM]

DMX and Synergy look awesome... going to have to find time to play with those!

More screens!!

I must say I was impressed with Nvidia's multi-head setup on Linux, managed to get it going without editing the Xorg.conf. That was a first! Now if they'd just open-source their drivers/code we'd have a winner.