Tom Watson's MultiDisplay PC's
Count Started 04/06/99.
These Pictures Show Multi Display Computers built by Tom Watson. The main ingredient of creating low cost multidisplay computers are Linux and AcceleratedX Multi-Head Display Server. FVWM may also be required as it may be the only window manager with the speed and efficient use of system resources that won't bog down your computer.
The display of these computers show Redhat and SuSE Linuxes running FVWM window manager over AcceleratedX. Mr. Watson has developed the ergonomic fvwmrc multidesktop per display over a couple of years of experimenting. NOTE: This fvwmrcsupports the original fvwm, not fvwm2
These images also show the NEW Number Nine Visual Technology Digital Flat Panel Solution Pack. The Number Nine Digital Flat Panel Solution Pack use a Number Nine Revolutin IV 32 meg PCI or AGP card to drive a Silicon Graphics SW1600 flat panel. The SGI SW1600 has dazzling color saturation and the performance of the Number Nine Revolution IV Card is ASTOUNDING.
Using the current beta version of the AcceleratedX-X/OGL Technology Demo with the Number Nine Revolutin IV Video Card showed what can only be described as AMAZING performance.
FVWM is an extremely Fast and resource efficient Window Manager. Alas, none of the current Linux distributions use FVWM as the default intalled window manager. (Dear Redhat and SuSE wake up and feel the power of FVWM.) KDE is currently tens times as slow and may require ten times the resources of FVWM.
The jpeg togetm.jpg below shows side by side a photo of and xterm with a 5x7 font. The SW1600 has a resolution of 1600x1024 and the Hitachi 21" monitor was operating at a resolution of 1600x1200. The 5x7 xterm on the Hitachi is a shade under 4" wide while the 5x7 xterm on the SW1600 is 3 7/8" This side by side comparison gives an idea of the incredable sharpness of the SW1600. There is a clear plastic scale shown in each photo to assist in gaging the screen shots.
Comments or suggestions nostaw@watman.com
About this Web Page.
The pictures pointed to by this web page were taken with a Sony Digital Mavica FD-91 digital still camera. The pictures are 1024x768 and range in size from 170 to 200 kbyte.
Gamma and color correction was done with XV a shareware program included with all Linux distrubutions. The emboss background gif was also created using XV.
The image map was created in a two step process using a simple shell script using the montage command that is part of the image magic tool kit to create labeled thumbnails of all pictures Image Magic tools are also shareware that come with all Linux distributions.
The shell script called makeblackthumbs.com is as follows.
mkdir thumbs
for i in `ls *.jpg`
do
montage -bg black -bordercolor black -fg white -geom 100x100 -label $i $i thumbs/$i
done
All the labeled thumbnails are combined into a montage jpeg with the following command.
montage -bg black -bordercolor black -geom 122x122 -tile 5x4 thumbs/*.jpg poo_idx.jpg
poo_idx.jpg is the image map file.
Having standardized on an image map size and a tile of 5 by 4, the locations of the images remains constant between multiple image maps. This allows me to use the code editor crisp and column copies to quickly edit a template html file.
The creation of a web page like this takes about 20 to 30 minutes with most of the time being spend on individual image manipulations. The editing of the html file takes 2 to 3 minutes.
Home
Number Nine
AcceleratedX
Crisp the ultimate code editor.
And of Course, my favorite Linux Office Suite Applixware
FVWM, The Window Manager of the Efficient.
Redhat
SuSE
And Always Remember... It's a terrible thing to infect an intel microprocessor with a BORG virus.
An example imagemap.
This image, map, and HTML
created by Tom Watson.