[sugar] Shared Terminal Idea

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

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Walter Bender wrote:
| In general, it'd be great to be able to share like this for most
| activities. Another way of thinking about sharing would be to share
| resources of multiple laptops to get a bigger workspace, e.g., some
| times it is useful to have multiple xterms open. This would seemingly
| be simple to do in the context of the X Window System if we wrap the
| appropriate Sugar/Collaboration model around it. I can think of lots
| of activities that are someone space constrained at times--having the
| option of a larger or multiple screens--putting the debugging output
| on a separate laptop, for example. Future feature wish list.

What you are describing is very similar to the Distributed Multihead X
system (DMX, also called Xdmx).
See, for example, the pictures in
(http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-mltihed/index.html)

There has been renewed interest in DMX among X developers, especially in
the context of Multiple-Pointer X (MPX) and the new rendering plans.  If
you think this is of interest to Sugar, it might be worth talking to an X
expert.

For the record, I think that this is probably not a good idea for Sugar.
DMX requires a potentially huge amount of network bandwidth, with little
tolerance for latency or packet loss.  It also seems inevitably,
tremendously complicated for a user to manage.  But don't listen to me;
talk to someone who actually knows where the DMX work is headed.

- --Ben
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