More Work Surface
I usually work on a laptop with an external monitor, but given the abundance of monitors at home I've looked around for some way to use a RaspberryPI as "wireless video interface" and further extend my display real estate. I've not been able to find any method, but I've found I'm not the only one with the same idea. Many suggest to adopt Synergy to switch seemlessy across the desktops, but... Oops, Synergy no longer works with Wayland.
Investigating a little been more, I've found a little gem called x2vnc. It seems to be no longer developed, but incredibly still works (even on Wayland).
On the Raspberry, apt-get install x11vnc
and set up it to run at the beginning of the X session (I've added the line exec x11vnc -nopw -forever
in my ~/.i3/config
file).
On your PC, apt-get install x2vnc
and run x2vnc -west IP_ADDRESS_OF_RASPBERRY:0
VoilĂ : now, moving the cursor of the mouse on the left side of your main screen, it will jump to the Raspberry screen.
The application is not perfect, I had to move my Gnome's Dash to Dock panel at the bottom of the main screen to avoid unexpected clicks, and sometime switching the environment the cursor travels from the Raspberry screen (on the far left) to the external laptop monitor (on the far right), but still seems to be a viable solution.
Tested on Raspberry 3 and 2A+, but the latter does not work very well.