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Borderless Windows Xfce 4

19 May, 2007

Since I've been using my new desktop/server machine with dual monitor support I've been desperately trying to set up a fullscreen VNC connection to Windows XP on one of the monitors and keep the other for a sensible Linux desktop. I very quickly managed to get a 1280x1024 VNC connection to Windows XP but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get the VNC display to work full screen on just one of the monitors, either part of the Windows desktop was off screen because I couldn't fit the window borders and the desktop onto the one screen or I had to resize the window and scrollbars appeared.

Here's some other ideas I tried which failed:

Fiddling with the window sizes in Gnome in the hope of getting the whole visible area of the Window to overlap with the visible screen area.
Using the ratpoison window manager - I couldn't get it to place the VNC window on the second monitor
Using xvncviewer in full screen mode - it just made a 1280x1024 screen in the middle of my two screens with the remaining portions blacked out
Enabling the Metacity toggle_fullscreen option in Gnome using gconf-tool2 - it just did nothing - apparently a bug in the version I was using.

I'm pleased to say I have found a solution, I've switched to Xfce 4. You simply drag the VNC window to the monitor you want and hit Alt+F11 to full screen it. Works perfectly and is so simple. I now have a workspace for Linux/WindowsXP and one for a dual screen Linux setup. Next I'm going to play with GNU screen which by all accounts sounds quite interesting.

I actually like Xfce generally, it feels quite speedy and has nice drop shadow and transparency effects built in which are fun to play with for 2 minutes before they become irritating and get disabled.

Update: Sadly this looks like it might be a temporary solution because I'm sure I read somewhere that 4.4 will be fully freedesktop.org compliant and therefore not allow fullscreen windows. This would be a disaster so I hope this is a mistake on my part.