Running a second X: Xnest, Xephyr and xinit (Shallow Thoughts)

Running a second X: Xnest, Xephyr and xinit

I had a silly problem: I needed to make some screenshots, but my window borders were too pretty.

The problem isn't actually that they're pretty; it's that the theme I wrote for openbox is very different from the much simpler theme I used to use in fvwm, and I needed new screenshots that matched the old fvwm look. Preferably without actually going back to using fvwm -- I'm quite happy with openbox these days.

Anyway, the obvious solution is to run a second X. I had done that in the past (when I needed to test something repeatedly, like a wacom tablet, and didn't want to be restarting X all the time) so I knew that was possible. But then someone told me about Xnest. It's a way to run an X server embedded in a window of the current X session. What a neat idea! I wanted to try it.

I made a simple .xinitrc.xnest file that starts fvwm after loading .Xdefaults. It took some fiddling to find a combination of arguments that worked. In the end, this was it:
xinit ~/.xinitrc.xnest -- /usr/bin/Xnest -ac :1 -geometry 1024x768
And indeed, a 1024x768 window popped up with an fvwm running inside it. Cool! Except it turned out to be not so cool -- because as soon as I switched desktops, I found that the Xnest window wouldn't repaint itself. Not even after being covered with another window then uncovered -- it just didn't seem to get any expose events. Bummer!

Next I tried Xephyr -- I heard that it was similar to Xnest, a little more heavyweight but a little more reliable. It turned out the arguments were just the same, so I ran it exactly like Xnest:
xinit ~/.xinitrc.xnest -- /usr/bin/Xephyr -ac :1 -geometry 1024x768
but Xephyr was even worse about window redrawing, plus it had some problems with the mouse pointer, which kept jumping to random places.

Too bad! They both sounded fun, and I'm sure they'll improve and will eventually become usable. But for now, I'm back to the simpler solution, running a second X server. Here's how that works: first I have to log in on console 2 (ctl-alt-F2). For some reason, I can't run a second X except from there. Then I run:
startx ~/.xinitrc.xnest -- :1 and I get a new X session, on ctl-alt-F8 (with my regular session still accessible on ctl-alt-F7).

Tags: X11, screenshots
[ 21:01 Jul 16, 2008    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]