Moving applications between sessions

[Daniel Pittman]

Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> writes:

> At any given time, I usually have two KDE sessions running (as the
> same user).  One on my laptop display and one via NX.  The NX one will
> be suspended if I'm not at work, and the laptop will be in my desk if
> I am. Sometimes, I'll find that an application that I want to run is
> already running in the other session and won't let me run multiple
> copies (eg, firefox & kontact).  Is there a way to grab the
> application from display 0 and put it on display N?

Short answer, no.  Long answer, mostly no.

Doing this requires specific support from the entire application stack,
from application code, toolkit and underlying X libraries.

The code would essentially have to disconnect from the old X server and
reconnect to the new X server -- rebuilding all the GUI resources it
used in the process including Windows, images, fonts, share memory
segments, &c.

This is a very complex process and, currently, I don't believe there is
anything more than vague developer level experimental support for it.


You /can/ also use a "proxy" model: one where an application sits
between your X server and your X clients.  If that proxy supports moving
applications from one display to another then this can work.

That means the proxy needs to support *every* extension that the client
uses, though, and the complexity of that has meant that they actually
support only the very basic X protocol -- and, so, not much of what
recent clients actually want.

> I could just run one session and access it via krfb, but the geometry
> sucks :-)

Well, you may be able to fix that by giving different directives to the
underlying software ... but I agree that it isn't a great solution. 

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
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