Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

This is something I had thought of a while back, but with a couple of recent news articles I've been thinking of it again.

PSP Hack Turns Your Handheld Into a 2nd Computer Screen
4.3 Inch WVGA Monitor Can Run on USB Juice Alone

This would be an awesome way to put an old 770 to use. Touchscreen would be a bonus, but even just a passive display would be nice. Anybody have any ideas if this is even possible? If so, is there anyone willing to attempt it?

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

How about as a headmount display?

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

• VNC
• RDP
• X11 (maybe with xdmx)

All should work fine, depending what you want.

I've been considering xdmx with my Eee and two N800s, but not real sure it's worth doing and don't have time.

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

I was going to play around with this prior to my 770 WSODing. I don't know how to do it under Windows, but with Linux you can setup X11 forwarding over VNC to get another device to work as another monitor over the network with lower bandwidth requirements than X11 by itself.

I've seen Windows shareware programs to let other Windows systems and Windows Mobile handhelds to act as second monitor over the network (or the USB connection on the WM handhelds). However, not run across anything for the Nokia ITs yet.

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

I use RDP to access my server all the time, but what I'm wanting is a secondary display, one that I can drag a window from my primary monitor to the Internet Tablet's screen, etc. It could be used to display an email client, stock ticker, desktop widgets, or anything that could be used on a small screen. Basically, all the functionality of having two monitors on a Windows computer without all the bulk.

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

Yeah, on second thought, RDP is probably out, as it shares the whole display. (I think this could probably be worked around, but it would definitely be a lot of hassle.) On a Windows version supporting multiple sessions, you could still have a separate session, which would be adequate for auxiliary displays, though not part of the desktop...

VNC is a better bet for Windows machines; you just need to set up an additional monitor that's not actually connected, and run VNC on that display.

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

Hardware:

If your graphics card supports two monitors, or a TV out, just plug in a dummy device. This usually does not work for a monitor unless you actually plug in a monitor, but the TV out can be easily tricked into thinking a TV is there...


Software


For Windows:

http://www.zoneos.com/zonescreen.htm - Virtual Monitor

It takes away the Vista effects, so...


For Linux:

x11 monitor forwarding


Comments:

I did this with my T3 some time ago. Obviously, over a bluetooth link with a Palm device, things were slow, but don't expect video or something. Also, the DPI difference makes thing complicated. Something big on the screen will be TINY on the tablet. Just FYI....

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

I've toyed with X11vnc before, which simply forwards your X session on a Linux machine to a VNC client (i.e. the tablet); To get your own virtual display/etc it's possible to muck around with your x server settings to get a session that stretches across two sessions (I forget what it's called now, but it's what you do when you have two displays that you want to act as one giant desktop), but have not played with that. My biggest problem with it was the speed... on the tablet, even with a customized lower-resolution X-server to VNC into, the performance is still pretty terrible... good enough to use as a VNC client if you're expecting that typical "VNC latency" sort of thing, but definately NOT good enough to use as a "second monitor" that you'd actually interact with on a regular basis... that's just my experiences though...

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

Yeah, speed is an issue using VNC (worse with X11 directly) if you were planning on running visualizations for MP3s in WinAmp/XMMS, but I was more thinking of using it to display system stats (temps, uptime, CPU load, etc.).

If you want visualizations and perhaps even video, you'll need to port FreeNX to the tablet.

Re: Internet Tablet As Computer Monitor?
 

I use NX for remote desktops. It allows one to run one application or whole DE on a remote server with very little overhead, caching, shadow copies, resuming. There is no NX client for the NIT yet though. Its one of the things I'd like to port once I got my Scratchbox well working on x86-64. Therefore, for now, I use ssh -fXTC hostname appname which works well, but doesn't support resuming and provides more overhead than NX. However, it does the job. NXserver is for X; it won't run on Windows. It doesn't use VNC. You can run a RDP server on *NIX as well, called xrdp which is RDP server. Internally it heavily relies on VNC and X mapping the RDP protocol to those protocols; therefore huge overhead on the server. But, not on the client.