alt Hacker NewsYep. When did virtual screens come in? My last full time experience with X was with Xsun in the early 2000s under Solaris. There was a shared cursor, I thought you could drag windows between monitors, but I also thought the DISPLAY variable was different for each (though I could be misremembering)
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rwmj • yesterday at 11:18 PM
$DISPLAY is definitely different for each X11 screen, ie. :0.0 for the first screen, :0.1 for the second and so on. (:1, :2 is used for more instances of the X11 server).
I can't recall any application able to use multiple X11 screens (except in the trivial sense that you could set DISPLAY when starting the application), and I've been using X11 since X11R4.
2007 is when xrandr 1.2 came and made it feasible to use on a laptop - enable/disable outputs dynamically without restarting X.
Xinerama (the extension that enables one virtual screen over multiple outputs) existed before but the layout could only be defined statically - so you'd need to restart your X server with a different config if you wanted to connect a monitor or a projector or something.