Re: [tlug] 2014-05-10 Linux Quiz

[Travis Cardwell <travis.cardwell@example.com>]

On 2014年05月11日 23:35, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> I certainly wouldn't buy Apple products for the purpose of doing a
> live demo of Linux -- I would be willing to bet money that the Linux
> drivers aren't up to snuff, for almost any aspect of the machine.
>
> But the kind of thing you described should be trivial in Mac OS X.
> Specifically, I regularly edit lecture notes in XEmacs on the MacBook
> screen and redisplay them with a single keystroke in Preview on the
> big screen.  The setup is basically the same, except that the notes
> are written directly in LaTeX, and I don't try to automatically
> capture interactive usage.

Creating a solution that works on OS X would have likely been a lot less
complicated.  Many of my difficulties were due to using Linux on OS X.  In
case there is any interest, I am including an explanation from an email
that I sent to a friend before the presentation [1].

By the way, if you would like the PDF to automatically refresh (to avoid
having to click in Preview), you might want to try Skim:

http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/

> Funny thing is, the IM just works (including "te-gaki" ;-) ...

Nice example; I do not think I have ever gotten tomoe to work in Debian,
as uim-tomoe-gtk does not appear to be in the package manager.  I have not
put much effort into it, however, as I do not really need it.  If anybody
has a reference for getting it working, I would be interested in seeing
it.

Tangent: Does anybody use ATOK?

Cheers,

Travis

----

[1] In a private email, I wrote:

Doing live editing with two displays is very easy on my (all Linux)
workstation.  I use VMware to run Linux on my laptop, and I was under the
impression that it would expose two displays to the guest OS, making it no
different.  When I tried it, however, I found that it just exposed one
display spanning both physical displays, which does not work for my needs.

I then tried setting up a virtual machine in VirtualBox, as it might
handle multiple displays differently.  It turns out that VirtualBox does
not expose multiple displays to guest systems at all.

I then figured that I could put a Linux installation on a USB stick and
simply boot Linux and get around the Apple issues.  Looking into it,
however, I found that the Apple boot sequence is protected.  Configuring
it to boot a non-Apple OS would entail big changes that I am unwilling to
make because I cannot afford to lose the time fixing it if it goes wrong.

I then had the idea of simply updating the PDF on a mount that is shared
with OS X, and displaying the presentation PDF with OS X directly.  The
first issue I ran into is that OS X only supports full screen on one
display at a time (WTF!?!?).  It is a long-standing complaint that has
never been fixed, apparently.  Some software, such as VLC, avoid standard
OS X libraries in order to get around it, as putting a movie on an
external display is a common task.  Presentations are another common task,
and I was able to find some free PDF software that supports full-screen
mode on any display.  Unfortunately, it did not work because the displayed
PDF did not auto-refresh!  The software supports auto-refresh, but it must
be implemented via filesystem hooks that are not triggered by my virtual
machine mount.

After pulling my hair for a while, I had another idea.  While VirtualBox
does not expose multiple displays to guest systems, it can display
separate virtual machines in full screen on separate displays, getting
around the OS X issue.  I created two separate virtual machines, one for
my laptop display and one for the projector, and was able to get them to
go full screen on separate displays successfully!  I connected them using
a password-less SSH key, and the projector display refreshes automatically
when I rebuild within the other VM. :)

Unfortunately, OS X still made things difficult.  Though each display runs
Linux VMs full-screen, focus between the separate displays is managed by
OS X!  In order to enter keypresses in the projector VM (in order to go to
the next slide, etc.), I therefore have to click within that display
first!  Then, to continue editing on my laptop display, I have to click
there.  During my tests, it was very problematic, with selection issues on
the laptop display (which are annoying, but only I can see) as well as
many unintentional slide transitions on the projector display (which is
unacceptable since the audience sees it).

So, I wrote a program to send keypresses to the projector display, which I
can run via SSH within the laptop display VM.  Using that remote control
program, I can now manage the projector display without having to move my
mouse there.  Though the result is overly complicated, it should work on
Saturday. :)