On Sep 14, 6:49 pm, Moshe Goldfarb <brick.n.st...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 7 wrote:
> > If someone brings out a digital photoframe that can update a little
> > quicker from a USB 2 cable, then to all intents and purposes it is a
> > 'USB monitor'.
Sounds a bit like a simple X-server to me.
> > Highly useful if motherboards with Linux bios like
> > splashtop running Linux servers has support for these USB monitors.
Linux could easily power the USB monitors. Remember, Linux was doing
X11 on machines with 4 megabytes of RAM, 100 megabytes of storage, and
a very simple graphics card. These days, such an "appliance" would be
trivial to put into something about the size of an SD flash chip. The
LCD controller would require some extra pin-outs.
Remember that the Sharp Zeos could fit an LCD and the rest of a PDA
with a fully functional Linux system back when a simple PDA would
barely fit in a shirt pocket and competitors running Windows CE had
very limited functionality.
A USB Display is a very typical Linux "appliance" scenario. And if
you don't see the Windows logo, there's a pretty good chance that it's
running embedded Linux.
> > They could boot and display meaningful things through the highly
> > portable USB monitor instead of regular monitors. Suddenly
> > everything from laptops to real PCs need the 'USB monitor' and
> > splashtop in every motherboard before it can sell.
The main advantage of a USB monitor is that it simplifies the
interconnection to the display from a complex ribbon cable to a small
number of wires. This also means that resolution could be very small,
for status information, or a large 1080p display for the primary
display - or 10 displays :-D..
> The Linux community can't even manage to get xorg to work properly.
There was a bug with xorg in hardy heron. Too much of a rush to move
up to the next version without testing it properly. You brought up
the thread and cited the dialogue, and in about a week, Ubuntu team
had figured out what they had done wrong, and fixed it.
Other Linux distributors, and even other Ubuntu distributions, have
had much better results with X.org X11/GLX/XGL, and haven't had any
significant problems. You got a good catch. Have you seen similar
panics on SUSE, RHEL, PCLinuxQS, Linspire, or any of the commercially
supported distributions?
> They don't stand a chance at making your idea work, although it does
> seem like a good idea.
Actually, it's a trivial application in Linux. In fact, X-Servers
would be very trivial, and you could easily use USB as a transit
protocol.
> Bandwidth is the issue though. Firewire might be a better choice?
Actually, X11 works very nicely, even on 10 Megabit/second
connections. 100 Megabit/second provides sufficient bandwidth for
BOTH X11 AND NFS or SAMBA. USB-2 is 400 Megabits/second.
You can even get high speed 3-D graphics using GLX / XGL (X11 with
OpenGL protocol).
It's a bit ancient today, but remember VRML? VRML (Virtual Reality
Modelling Language) had the ability for a site to show a real-time
display and rotate it, zoom, and rotate on all axis, and all of that
in real-time. Unfortunately, it first came out back when most PCs
were running 80486/DX-100 processors, which meant that the processor
couldn't keep up with the VRML commands.
Today, we have 2 Ghz processors that run almost 8000 times faster than
those old 80486 processors. We also have 128 bit graphics chips that
can implement OpenGL and X11 commands internally. Linux could easily
be used to create a USB display.
> Moshe Goldfarb
> Collector of soaps
http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/
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