[vox-tech] VMWare Linux client - how to notice screen resize?

[Ken Bloom]

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 19:11 -0700, Bryan Richter wrote:
> At work, I'm using CentOS 5.2 running as a VMWare client on a Windows
> XP host. CentOS has Gnome running by default, which runs the window
> manager Metacity by default.
> 
> VMWare, like other virtual machine apps, provides a set of client-side
> functionality that allows things such as client-to-host copy/paste.
> The particular function I am interested in is the bit that handles the
> virtual machine's window being resized. When the window is resized,
> there's some magic that makes X realize it should resize its root
> window.
> 
> This all works. Metacity somehow catches wind of the resizing. When
> the X root window is resized, Metacity resizes all its workspaces. If
> it has to, it moves and resizes its own client windows so everything
> shows up on the resized X root window.
> 
> Of course, I want to be difficult. I don't like Gnome; I use the Ion3
> window manager. Ion3 does not, unfortunately, catch the same hint that
> Metacity catches.
> 
> I assume that the X server is sending some signal that Metacity
> catches. Does anybody have any clue what that signal is? If I can
> figure that out, I can hopefully patch Ion3 to handle it.
> 
> -- 
> Bryan Richter
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> vox-tech mailing list
> vox-tech at lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech

I figure it's probably related to XRandR. Perhaps you can confirm that
by using XRandR to change the resolution of a real monitor running Ion3
and see whether the behavior is the same broken behavior or whether it
works there.

If you get the same broken behavior, you could look at
http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/randr/randr/ which is an introduction to
XRandR. I didn't read through it, but I searched and found a statement
that may be relevant "Clients can select for RRScreenChange events to be
informed if certain properties of a screen have changed."

Let us know how this works out for you.

--Ken

-- 
Ken (Chanoch) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/
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