What's it all about, Alfie?

I have been having to move many of my applications at work to 64-bit address space because of the memory limitations on the default 32-bit. As a consequence, I've had to port CKit to 64-bit and I have to say, I like the way I've handled the build. Rather than have a multi-pass build from scratch like SQLAPI++, I've decided to have .o and .o64 files and have them built side-by-side. This means that we still use make and the dependency tool and that means rebuilds are faster. Not earth shattering, but nice and clean.

OK, I spent some time getting a dual-head system going on a sun box I have at work. It's nothing fancy, but it makes development a little nicer. The trick was in knowing what needed to be done to get things set up right. So here are the steps so that I don't have to figure it out again.

I installed a second XVR-100 video card in the box and did a simple boot -r to get Solaris to see the device. Then I needed to configure the two devices so they were the same. The devices ended up being /dev/fbs/pfb0 and /dev/fbs/pfb1.

  fbconfig -dev pfb0 -res 1280x1024x60
  fbconfig -dev pfb1 -res 1280x1024x60
  fbconfig -dev pfb0 -depth 24
  fbconfig -dev pfb1 -depth 24
  fbconfig -dev pfb0 -fake8 enable
  fbconfig -dev pfb1 -fake8 enable

and you can check the configuration with:

  fbconfig -dev pfb0 -propt

Now you need to change the Xservers file to have both devices and xinerama mode. To do this you need to make sure that /usr/dt/config/Xservers points to /etc/dt/config/Xservers and that there's a like that looks a lot like this in it:

  :0  Local local_uid@console root /usr/openwin/bin/Xsun +xinerama
     -dev /dev/fbs/pfb0 -dev /dev/fbs/pfb1 left -nobanner

...all on one line, of course. Now reboot. The CDE login screen should come up on one display but the mouse should move seamlessly between the two.

Now fix WindowMaker - the trick is knowing that xinit can allow you to completly specify the X server to use. So I made an alias to start WindowMaker like this:

  alias wm 'xinit ~/.xinitrc-wmaker -- /usr/openwin/bin/Xsun
     +xinerama -dev /dev/fbs/pfb0 -dev /dev/fbs/pfb1 left >>&! /dev/null'

with this, I can start it easily and get both heads working as they should.