Re: Making Movies: problems

[Marcus G. Daniels]

ST> I believe this is NOT doable with the Pixmap code in Swarm-1.3.

The Right Thing would be to enhance the Swarm widgets such that they
had conditionals for a `printer' mode of display update.  In X11R6.4,
this would mean using the Xp library (selecting the xwd or PCL raster
backends of the Xprt X server).  Structurally, (Win32) GDI (or AWT)
would need something similiar.

But I don't think it's worth the work, especially considering there is
virtual frame buffer server distributed with X11, which can do the job. 

If you want to make offline snapshots of a Swarm run, I suggest a
procedure like this:

1. Get and install `xmove' and `Xvfb'.

xmove source:   
     ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/pub/xmove/xmove.2.0beta2.tar.gz

Xvfb Redhat binary: 
     http://rufus.w3.org/linux/RPM/XFree86-Xvfb.html

Xvfb Solaris binary:
     ftp.santafe.edu/pub/swarm/users-contrib/anarchy/Xvfb-solaris

2. Start xmove

$ xmove 2>&1 > /tmp/xmove.log &

3. Start Xvfb

$ (Xvfb :2 -screen 0 1152x900x8 2>&1) > /tmp/Xvfb.log & 

4. Set your DISPLAY to point at your-host:1.  xmove creates this 
screen proxy for your applications to talk to.

$ export DISPLAY=$HOSTNAME:1

5. Run your snapshot-equipped application.

$ heatbugs &

(click start)

6. Move it off screen to the virtual framebuffer.

$ xmovectrl -moveall $HOSTNAME:2

7. Log off

8. Log on, reset the DISPLAY to $HOSTNAME:1, and run:

$ xmovectrl -moveall $HOSTNAME:0

to bring heatbugs back to the foreground.

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