[gpm]Feature request

[Greg Stark]

Alessandro Rubini <rubini@ar.linux.it> writes:

> > I have an idea that would be cool for a new feature. I have a console for my
> > router displaying data constantly. I frequently want to copy/paste that data
> > onto my desktop on my workstation.
> 
> Then just send your log data through the network, and collect it elsewhere.

It happens not to be logs. But sure, same idea.

>  
> > What would be cool would be if i could run gpm on the router, but
> > instead of having it read from a real physical mouse on that
> > machine, have it read from a named pipe I create.
> 
> This is not difficult. I've been piping mouse data through the net for
> quite a while, since I needed the local serial port for other tasks,
> the mouse was connected to a remote serial port. Not an issue.

Oh, I didn't realize this would just work. I didn't even think of trying it.

> > Then have a program on my desktop ship data out to appear
> > on that named pipe. Ideally something like x2x that emulates having more
> > desktop real estate off the edge of the desktop.
> 
> This _is_ an issue. You need X to be aware of all of this. It's not a
> well-defined problem space, at least as you describe it, and even if
> you define the problem in a clean way, it's not trivial at all to
> implement.  You'll need to dig in X internals, and change some of it,
> probably making it non-portable.

Perhaps I didn't explain well. I don't think you need to dig into any X
internals. x2x already does exactly this type of behaviour except it sends
synthetic X mouse motion events to a remote X server. The difference here is
that I would want to construct synthetic raw mouse motion data to send to the
named pipe for gpm to read.

Actually getting copy/paste to work would be pretty hard with that approach
though. Hm. Perhaps it would make more sense to have gpm be an X client of the
remote display and watch for mouse motion events. That still doesn't need any
X internals but requires more changes in gpm. It has the advantage of making
copy/paste relatively simple to implement.

> > That way I could transparently move the mouse off the edge of my X11 desktop
> > on my workstation, onto the gpm space on the console of the router.
> > Implementing copy/paste would the next step.
> 
> Best is using an xterm or equivalent tool that locally tracks log
> messages received via TCP or UDP. I personally tendo to UDP logs to
> the broadcast address when I need to track them over the lan.

Yeah sure I could do that. But it would a) take up screen real-estate on my
desktop which would defeat the purpose of having this data displayed on the
router and b) not work for any other data such as when actively working on the
router. To reproduce exactly the setup I would have to add an extra graphics
card to my desktop and get a kvm switch then start an xterm covering the extra
monitor completely and an ssh session to the router.

Sure it would work, but it wouldn't help anyone else. I could also just run
windows and forget about all this stuff :)

-- 
greg