Updates on my GUI for RandR

First of all, thanks for the attention you paid to the previous news on my GUI for RandR.

I have chatted to the guys behind the development of Displayconfig and I must admit that they are doing an amazing work which, in my opinion, is the best solution. I have decided that I will continue working on my app (which is much less ambitious since it relies exclusively upon RandR) and I hope to be of help (I’m not trying to duplicate efforts) also to the development of their application. It won’t be easy since my approach to the problem is rather different. As soon as I’m done with the exams I’ll have more time to spend on both projects.

As regards my application I changed its name to “URandR” (which you can pronounce as “you render”). I have created a new project on Launchpad and set up a bazaar branch from which you can get the code (which is still under heavy development).

A Canadian chap, Jean-François Fortin Tam, volunteered to make the GUI of URandR HIG-compliant. I think he did an excellent work (and my previous GUI did really need some love). Thanks to him URandR now uses tabs and no longer needs a scrollbar. The interface he designed in Glade is much cleaner. I connected URandR to his interface and now new tabs spawn up when a new device is detected. He also designed an additional tab that in the next future will enable you to choose between cloning screens and having multiple screens with distinct workspaces (it’s disabled by default since the implementation is not ready).

As I said last time, the requirements to run URandR are the following:

  • a driver which supports RandR 1.2 (such as the Intel driver 2.0 and *I guess* the experimental open source ATI driver) (however in the future ATI and Nvidia will support RandR 1.2 as well)
  • xserver-xorg 1.3 (Fedora 7, Debian Sid, Ubuntu Gutsy, etc. have it)
  • URandR works well on Fedora 7 and Debian Sid. I can connect my laptop to any display and TV I have at home just with a few clicks.

    TODO:

  • Implement different Multi Screens options (Xinerama, etc.)
  • Rotate Wacom tablets and mouse cursors automatically if the screen is rotated
  • Clean the code and use SimpleGladeApp (as glatzor suggested)
  • Make a deb package
  • SCREENSHOTS:

    I took this screenshot on Fedora 7 after connecting my laptop to my TV (as you can see from the 2nd tab):
    URandR on Fedora 7

    I took this screenshot on Debian Sid (ok, it’s an idle interface but I promise I’ll show you something better, maybe a screencast):
    URandR on Debian Sid

    P.S. I can’t compile RandR 1.2 from GIT (and yes, I made a build-dep of randr), can anyone help me to compile it, please?

    6 thoughts on “Updates on my GUI for RandR

    1. @Ubuwu
      It’s still under heavy development. I’ll improve the quality of the explanations as well.

    2. Good work Alberto, keep on with it! 🙂 I’m looking forward for news on this project! (Xinerama support would rock so much!)

    3. could the LVDS tab just be altered to use a more descriptive device name and the explanation dropped?

    4. @Rob
      I can change the names on the tabs however I have yet to decide what to do with the explanations.

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