Raspberry Pi Forums

I'm new to any form of coding or hardware let alone Linux, and I'm just trying to get everything setup for some flexibility for my projects.

Most of the time I will be using a desktop monitor for working with the Pi, but there will be situations where I would like to use my iPad as a portable screen. I currently have x11vnc starting up at boot to show display:0, so it mirrors the primary desktop, but I can't figure out how to show the mouse cursor. I understand it would be sluggish to use and thats ok, but it isn't showing at all on the VNC display let alone drawing it slowly. EDIT: As you may have guessed, this was just an issue in my VNC viewer settings. Whoops.

My second question is my desktop monitor uses a 1920x1200 display and the ipad is 1024x768. Once this is set up properly I wont be using both displays at once. Is there a way I can have the Pi change resolution depending on whether it detects an HDMI connection or not? That way if I don't have an HDMI cable plugged in it will boot in 1024x768 to best display on the iPad and when it does detect an HDMI connection it'll be setup best for my desk monitor.

Thanks for your help! I've made it this far from forum posts in the community and I'm excited to keep digging in.

To the first part of your query, start x11vnc with -nocursorshape -display :0

There are other cursor related options, see http://linux.die.net/man/1/x11vnc where, for example it states

Some VNC viewers support the TightVNC CursorPosUpdates
and CursorShapeUpdates extensions (cuts down on network traffic by not having to send the cursor image every time the pointer is moved), in which case these extensions are used (see -nocursorshape and -nocursorpos below to disable). For other viewers the cursor shape is written directly to the framebuffer every time the pointer is moved or changed and gets sent along with the other framebuffer updates. In this case, there will be some lag between the vnc viewer pointer and the remote cursor position.

No experience with your second issue concerning resolution. My solution in the past using VNC was to create several displays with the required resolutions and invoke then via xinit, meaning you select the your required resolution and the appropriate instance is executed.

Googling gave http://superuser.com/questions/270608/c ... creen-size where FreeNX is suggested (never used it) but also state there is a -clip and -scale option in x11xvnc, which are discussed in the man-page (an example is included in the previous URL).