Nifty little tool – X2X

I’m working at my desk int he office for the first time in a while, mostly because I need the open desk space, and need to build pu the new server for CONGO. Since I’ve been doing most of my work on my laptop, using a desktop machine again has been a little tricky, mostly because I have everything tuned ‘just so’ on the laptop.
What I wanted was a way to attach my laptop and my desktop screen together. I knew it was possible using X2VNC, but that required VNC on the target machine- something not yet possible with X (or actually, I think it may be working now, but reqiures some fiddling).
Enter X2X a little tool that simply forwards keyboard and mouse motions to a second X server. Now, with the mere command of ‘x2x -to 10.0.0.65:0 -west’, I can slide my mouse off my primary desktop onto my laptop screen, just to the left of me. X-Selections work, mouse motions are working, yay!
For those who want to try this, there’s a hidden trick. If you’re running GDM (which most folks do), it is configured to, by default, not allow remote TCP connections to the X server. Edit the file /etc/gdm/gdm.conf, and look for the line ‘DisallowTCP=true’. Change that to ‘DisallowTCP=false’ and restart gdm (cd /etc/init.d; ./gdm restart). After logging in, make sure you have external connections enabled (I used ‘xhost +’ but that’s fairly insecure. man xhost for details on allowing individual remote hosts)
Now all I need is a way to slide a full window from one screen to another. Ahhahahah!