XBMC - seperate physical display

[aterlatus]

Hi all,

I've been playing around a bit lately with XBMC under gentoo and I was hoping I could run an idea past y'all to find out if it's feasible or not.

I have a 2-headed nvidia GFX card (one VGA, one DVI) and currently have my LCD screen hooked up to the VGA and my LCD TV hooked up to the DVI via HDMI. I've managed to get several methods working for using both displays and that's a pretty handy one all in itself. I've also got a script I use to launch wow to run on it's own X server (for a slight FPS boost) and that's what got me thinking...

Would it be possible to start XBMC on a new X server just on the TV, so when I wanna watch some vids I can fire up XBMC and it starts on a fresh X server just on the TV without affecting the existing system running on the monitor (IE, can still chat/browse/code/whatever I fancy that day on the monitor). Being able to ALT+F8 or something to see xbmc on my monitor too would be handy (same as I do now with WoW, ALT + F7/F8 to switch between the game and the desktop) but isn't essential. My current efforts have left me with either both or none, IE I can run xbmc on the TV fine but it I want to use it, it leaves the system unuseable (monitor has to show XBMC too). I'm hoping I can have different displays on each screen active at the same time, but the TV only kicking up on-demand (when I run XBMC) to save on resources when I'm not watching.

If it's possible, what should I be reading into? I'm still pretty new to the GUI side of linux (been using it on my servers for years, but only now moving on to the desktop). Any keywords I can search on would be hugely appreciated. I'm not expecting answers handed over on a silver plate, but a kick in the right direction would be great!

[Zepp]

Did you figure this out?

[jcat]

This is exactly what I do. It's called "Multi Seat X". I have a server type Gentoo box at home that has one X server usable for people to browse the web etc, and one X server that is used for the TV only. I created an init script that starts the extra X server and MythTV on that X server.

One thing I'm not sure about, is whether the nVidia cards that have dual outputs are truly multi-head cards. I use two separate nVidia cards, one for each X server.

If you want any specific info on running this multi seat X I will be happy to oblige


aterlatus:
Do you have any info on installing XBMC on Gentoo? Did you create some ebuilds yourself? What are the deps?



Cheers,
jcat

[aterlatus]

XBMC was pretty easy to get going under gentoo. I didn't create any ebuilds (not been using gentoo long enough to stop myself getting lost ;p) but if you grab a copy of the source and emerge --search for the listed deps (in the readme) and install those you need then it compiles and runs pretty well.

[iKiddo]