RE: [gentoo-user] *sob*

[Laurence Perkins]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk>
>Sent: Sunday, June 12, 2022 4:28 AM
>To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
>Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] *sob*
>
>On Sun, 12 Jun 2022 00:42:56 -0400, Alan Grimes wrote:
>
>> All of the followning statemens are true:
>>
>> 1. I am never not running seamonkey, it is always open at all times on
>> my left hand monitor, If at any point it was not on my left hand
>> monitor either I must have been going through a power failure or
>> something had broken it, because it is working at the moment I have
>> decided not to use emerge update for the next six months, two months
>> in to that period at this point.
>>
>> 2. Seamonkey is my default browser.
>>
>> 3. Seamonkey cannot be launched twice, ie it cannot be launched on my
>> right hand monitor because the monitors are using separte X servers
>> and it would need to be launched twice to come up on that monitor.
>
>The last statement is not quite true. It cannot be launched twice with the same profile. This was the first hit when googling "seamonkey launch two instances"
>
>http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_your_Mozilla_application_with_another_profile
>
>Is there a particular reason for running two X servers rather than one desktop on two screens? The latter completely avoids the problem you are having.
>
>
>--
>Neil Bothwick
>
>If God can't help you, how about Mr. Coffee?

I can think of a few ways around this mess actually...

1.  Use one X server for both screens, and should you happen to need a separate X server to contain something use xnest, xephyr, or a headless VNC server to run another X that you can have there as a window.
2.  Since you're using two X instances, and therefore two instances of your window manager, etc., create two profiles for all that which use separate seamonkey profile folders for their default browser.
3.  Go all the way and run your two X servers as two completely different user accounts.  I presume you're already using separate keyboard and mouse for each anyway since I'm not sure how it would work otherwise.
4.  Update your default browser string to explicitly set which X display to talk to.  Then it will open on your left monitor no matter where it's launched from.
5.  You can't really get away from having a default browser, and you probably don't want to since it'll break other things later, but you could make it launch a wrapper script that looks at what display it's on and behaves accordingly.
6.  There used to be something called "libteleport" that would let you transfer X programs from one display to another.  It was rarely used because programs had to be built against it, and most binary distros didn't...  But on Gentoo that should theoretically be easy...
7.  Several other browsers will automatically open new windows on whatever display their running instance is on (even over SSH...  long story...)  Since you don't want to switch to one of those you could port that functionality to Seamonkey.

I've probably missed a few options, that's just what I can think of off the top of my head.  

LMP