Chromium and X

Andrew Jackman <[email protected]> Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:02:50 -0600
Newsgroups gmane.comp.graphics.chromium.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
My name is Andrew Jackman.  I've had my eye on chromium for some time
now and I've finally gotten the opportunity to put it into action.  At
my disposal I have a laptop, a desktop with three nvidia graphics
cards, and another lesser desktop box.  The laptop is configured with
a single screen, the desktop with three screens, and the lesser box
with a single screen as well.  Moreover, I've been using a remote X
server (cygwin/X) to attempt to understand how Chromium interacts with
X.  It is because I don't understand how Chromium uses X that I am
writing this email.

As far as I can tell from the documentation, the app nodes and
mothership nodes do not interact at all with X.  It is the server
nodes (specifically the rendering nodes) that deal with X.  Is that
correct?  This would make sense to me as it seems that it is X's
responsibility to render the final GL stream using its loaded drivers.

To test this, I set up X on the greater box (three heads) with
Xinerama extensions disabled and a light window manager (like
fluxbox).  I used the crdemo.conf and the simplemural.conf examples to
try and get multiple windows going.  Despite various attempts, the
/single/ rendering window only showed up on the screen where the
appfaker was launched.

I did a similar test with the laptop and the remote X server and
consistently the single window appeared on the X server where appfaker
was launched.

I also did the following test on both setups and the result was only
one window rendering the atlantis demo without errors (no blank
window):

1: % cd mothership/configs
2: % python crdemo.conf atlantis &
3: % crserver &
4: % crappfaker

>From the two above experiment scenarios, my original hypothesis (that
crserver is the app that interacts with X) was disproved.

I have concluded that either Chromium is simply not doing what it's
supposed to do (because I only get one window despite any change in
the setup) or I am too ignorant to do what I want to do.

I am either asking for my fundamental ignorance to be cleared up or
some troubleshooting help.  Thank you!

Andrew Roy Jackman.

jackman@xe3 ~/cr-1.9/mothership/configs $ X -version

X.Org X Server 1.5.3
Release Date: 5 November 2008
X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0
Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.27-gentoo-r8 i686

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