The Multi-Pointer X server 115
worufu writes "Some weeks after releasing the MPX (Multi-Pointer X Server), the Linux world slowly seems to draw attention to the project which opens up the limits of simultaneous input devices of the current X server. The future possibities are unlimited and I cannot wait to see some nice applications supporting the advantages of multiple input devices.
From the project description: 'The Multi-Pointer X Server is an enhanced X server to support multiple mice. It provides users with one cursor per device. Each cursor can operate independently. A multicursor windowing system allows two-handed interaction with legacy applications, but also the creation of innovative applications and user interfaces.'"
From the project description: 'The Multi-Pointer X Server is an enhanced X server to support multiple mice. It provides users with one cursor per device. Each cursor can operate independently. A multicursor windowing system allows two-handed interaction with legacy applications, but also the creation of innovative applications and user interfaces.'"
Multi-Mouse (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:1)
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:2, Funny)
That's just my take.
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:2)
Settlers 2 (Score:2)
Re:Settlers 2 (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Settlers 2 (Score:1)
Re:Settlers 2 (Score:1)
Lemmings (Score:3, Informative)
As did a lot of games back on the Amiga, even PD games.
I remember an Asteroid PD clone where you moved the character with one joystick and with the other joystick you controlled the fire beam.
Was quite an immersive feeling.
Re:Lemmings (Score:1)
Re:Settlers 2 (Score:2)
Didn't they just release a Settlers 2 remake? Coincidence?
Window stretching (Score:3, Interesting)
Mind you, how do you keep the screen clean of fingerprints and pizza grease smears.
Re:Window stretching (Score:1)
Re:Window stretching (Score:1)
Re:Window stretching (Score:2)
Keep the cat out of the pizza.
Re:Only one hand available (Score:2)
Reminds me of Anakin (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:1, Offtopic)
Well, that's the thing about the Dark Side, isn't it? The #2 spot is actually worse than the #3, because #1 has to constantly crush you under his thumb, to keep you in your place and show you who's boss.
No, like Robinson Crusoe's father, I believe the middle station is best -- or rather, the middle station of the upper echelon. I'd go for, say #100 on the hit parade. High enoug
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:2)
Won't work. Vader has a tendency to waste people who fail him, no matter where they are.
Hell, Vader has a tendency to kill anyone, with him or against him, including the person in the #1 spot. The safest ones would be old, familiar Jedi like Luke or Obi-Wan, because Vader will have the decency (stupidity?) to face them head-on, alone, in a lightsab
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:1)
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:3, Interesting)
Which goes to show you that truth isn't so much stranger than fiction than it is less credible. Evil men aren't the titans they like to portray themselves as. They are typically petty men, puny vindictive characters whose insecurity worms away at their ego, driving them to seek external validation by extravagant displays of power and cruelty.
When social scientists and political thinkers looked at
[OT] Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:2)
I can't believe I didn't make that connection alright... forget Offtopic... should be modded "Insightful".
Works as well as "Mr. Burns as Goa'uld"...
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:2)
Actually, Vader is glamorous, while Anakin is a pathetic human being. Remember, int RotJ, when Luke removes Vader's helmet ? He's no longer an inhuman angel of death, but an old bald guy who can't even breath by himself.
It's the same as Nazi Germany: it was glamorous, but once the glamour was gone, those who had given themselves to it were no different th
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:2)
Re:Reminds me of Anakin (Score:1)
Four hands.. (Score:1, Interesting)
another way (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah, memories (Score:2, Funny)
We plugged PS/2 and a serial mouse into one Windows 95 or 98 box and then moved both the mice simultaneously. Great fun, you bet! Duh...
Re:Ah, memories (Score:1)
I wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I wonder... (Score:2, Informative)
http://research.microsoft.com/displayArticle.aspx
I would be a lot more impressed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:1)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
It's called the evdev interface... (Score:5, Interesting)
See the complicated configuration:
Now getting touchpad on my laptop to do all the cool stuff (up and back scroll buttions, iPod-like circular scrolling, etc) was a little more involved. I set a udev rule to make the device name explicit and I had to find the configuration entry on the net and cut-and-paste...
udev rule created in "new" file
This is on ubuntu with the current "stock" 2.6.15 kernel and Xorg packages.
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:5, Informative)
Ratboy.
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:1, Interesting)
The original X11 docs (rev 5 at least) list that the max number of mouse-buttons supported (according to the mouse_button_press_event docs) was 5. I don't think that there's any reason why one couldnt expand that number by altering the definition of all related structures in the X-protocol.
However, doing that would most likely break a lot of legac
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:3, Informative)
No it's not. It generally maps to buttons 4 and 5, specified in your X server config file, and causes problems for hardware with more than 5 buttons. XInput is rarely used by most apps (and most X servers), and there're lots of programs out there now that would fail if you mapped the mousewheel to different buttons, since it's a de facto standard to have them on buttons 4 and 5.
Drives me nuts when people say fundamentally incorrect things with authority, since they
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
And never mind that at least for me, this puts a severe hamper in usability for those who can't bother to use fine-tuning tools and quickly kill the patience of those that do. Having used high resolutions for the past years and not having them properl
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:3, Informative)
Notice what I commented out:
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
Thanks again for the tips though
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
Re:I would be a lot more impressed (Score:2)
Race conditions (Score:4, Insightful)
You can probably crash 99% of all X11 applications using two pointers
Re:Race conditions (Score:2)
What I'd like to know:
Does this work as a nested X server? In other words, can I run it in a window, using the native X's mouse as the primary mouse, and then have MPX have exclusive access to additional mice?
In the FAQ it talks about MPX having to 'guess' which pointer to use for QueryPointer. Looking at the xeyes screenshot, I wonder if it would be possible to extend it so that certain applications could be linked to a certain mouse in various ways (when multiple mice are possibly choices for functi
Re:Race conditions (Score:2)
Crisis or opportunity?
I've been wanting this for years. Unfortunately, not only have I had no time to work on it, but I still don't now that someone has done the basics, But I've thought of it as ways to have one user use two mice, not two users in one session each having his own mouse at the same display, and how to extend the UI to support it.
Havi
Re:Race conditions (Score:3, Informative)
Um, what race conditions ? Here's the basic pseudocode to an X application:
I don't really see how having 2, 20 or 200 pointing devices could cause any race conditions here. You just get 2, 20 or 200 times the amount of mouse events (assuming they are all actually used and won't just lie there) than before.
Re:Race conditions (Score:2)
Re:Race conditions (Score:2)
Good... (Score:1)
Re:Good... (Score:4, Funny)
Definately a different connotation.
Re:Good... (Score:1)
About time! (Score:5, Interesting)
It's great for when someone remotely logs on to help a user with a problem.
Gameplay would be very interesting - Use one mouse to point and shoot while using another to move around.
You can tutor someone else on the same computer. Maybe have the mice look different so there's no confusion.
Robotron!! (Score:1)
Re:About time! (Score:1)
Actually, that shouldn't make any difference. When you log into a remote computer and run an X client, it connects to your computer, and you use your local mouse and keboard because those are the ones your X server is connected.
Maybe if you were sitting right there, it may help, but remotely connected, it wouldn't make a difference...unless you are talking about something I've never heard of...
Re:About time! (Score:2)
And that's why X is completely inadequate for remotely helping a user with a problem. He's saying it would be nice to be able to log in in a vnc-like manner but have _your_ mouse pointer in one place, and the user's mouse pointer in another place.
Re:About time! (Score:2)
Re:About time! (Score:1)
It was great for playing a 2 player dungeon master style game called bloodwych (or something). Happy days indeed.
Re:About time! (Score:2)
Ditto.
I've wanted two hands "behind the glass" for years. (Like since I got one fingertip/finger-thumb-pincher back there with the current paradigm.)
It's not VR yet. But two hands is much cloaer than one.
I was just bitching about this (Score:1)
Benefit vs. current two-handed input? (Score:2)
Not many applications are likely to require a lot of mouse
This should be default (Score:1)
I think this is the future, I would love to play a game where I could do first-person bare-fist fighting by moving two moses up and down over my table! (Sword and shield would also be cool!)
-- We create the future!
2 person PC (Score:1)
Re:2 person PC (Score:5, Insightful)
In user interfaces, we basically assume that the computer interacts with one person at a tim But real world scenarios, two or more people can work on the same thing at the same time, or on different parts of the same thing, or on different things in the same space then put them together. But it's not possible to do this naturally on a single computer.
The key I think will to be to find the right metaphor, without being excessively literal. In the Desktop metaphor, windows are really like sheets of paper that can be shuffled around. I remember seeing this for the first time, and there was a tremendous sense that this would liberate us from a lot of artificial limitations. But sheets of paper aren't resizable, and don't have scroll bars. Many times in the early years, attempts were made to make the metaphor literal, showing a representation of a desk with file drawers, papers on top, and desk accessories like clocks and calculators. These attempts at literalism turned out to be a waste of space and time, and the metaphor was pared down to its barest essential: a two dimensional surface on which things can be arranged.
The shared computer is an important evolutionary step, but there are going to be a lot of missteps created by excessive literalism, until the fundamental transformation takes place in peoples' heads.
Two trends are going to unite in the future: the continued reduction in size and cost of computing hardware, and the continued increase in ubiquity and affordability of wireless networking. I see the end result, some time in the next twenty-five to fifty years, as this: the computer as we know it will no longer be the primary interface of human beings to information processing technology. By this I mean your grand children won't routinely carry laptops and PDAs, any more than you carry a riding crop. Instead, we will have computer enhanced environments in which people work in a natural and shared way. Interfaces will be heterogenous, from large wall sized screens or interactive tabletops, goggles that computer enhance vision (e.g. overlaying an animation on top of the copy machine to show how to unjam it), and countless sensors.
Naturally these environments will be shared, otherwise they aren't really environments.
This Multi-Pointer technology doesn't get us there, but it enables some steps in the right direction.
Re:2 person PC (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? I've heard of computers that can be used by more than one person at a time; they're called servers. Also, CVS and other change management systems a
Re:2 person PC (Score:1)
Re:2 person PC (Score:2)
my own case was pretty simple. freshman year of college i built myself a video project. it was pretty damned bright, a not very efficient bulb but 600watts of non-efficiency still adds up to pretty bright. so i had a huge screen (aka, painted sheet). plus, i had tw
Re:2 person PC (Score:2)
Also interesting (I think): Could this have an effect (positive or negative) on the efficiency and/or effectiveness of pair programming [wikipedia.org]?
Re:2 person PC (Score:2, Informative)
I have never tried this solution but from what I have read in the past it seems to be getting easier to handle multiple input devices and displays. I would agree with others that if you wanted the same login to hanle both sets of keyboards mice and monitors you run the risk of confusing the operators or the programs.
Re:2 person PC (Score:2)
That bit is easy with a two head nvidia video card (eg. VGA + TVout), ps/2 keyboard + mouse, usb keyboard + mouse and two copies of X running at once. You just need to add another layout with the name of your choice (eg. TVout) to your config file that tells it to use the correct monitor, keyboard and mouse. You then turn the second display on with a script that will contain a single line that looks like:
startx -- :1 -layo
Legacy app problems? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Legacy app problems? (Score:2)
Re:Legacy app problems? (Score:2)
Re:Legacy app problems? (Score:2)
Can you do the same (Score:2)
Imagine: You and your girl friend get each an RC - you watch Jon Steward and she hears the sound of Gilmore Girls.
Why? (Score:2)
It has to be said... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:It has to be said... (Score:1)
Sounds neat, but... (Score:1)
But sure. Multiple input devices in X would be great. The new API could be used to model the above application.
But don't forget to support my usb mixer input device.
Tactiva/Tactipad (Score:2)
This opens up X to the possibility of supporting something like the Tactipad. That's cool.
But I still think it's going to be awhile before I see the Tactipad at Best Buy...
A little bit closer (Score:2)
Geeze... talk about 1980's (Score:2)
Sigh.
If I am not mistaken... (Score:2)
Also, dual-input (if not dual cursors) handling by X is available today - I once hooked a serial mouse and a PS/2 mouse up at the same time to one of my Linux boxen, and by t
Multiple Sessions (Score:1)
Re:Multiple Sessions (Score:2)
I don't think they had to do anything very special; AFAIK they were using pretty standard x86 hardware and (two seperate) stock Xorg servers (using 2 config files). Dunno how they did it, but I k
wow, 2 mouse X....... That's Idea is so old! (Score:1)