[daip] AIPS, multi monitors, and spflg

[Eric Greisen]

On 05/15/2015 08:36 AM, Susan Neff wrote:
> Hi Eric,
>
> I am having problems with the AIPS TV and spflg.
>
> It has been working fine on my desktop, using an Apple cinema display,
> 1920 x 1200 pixels.  Recently I liberated a second display.  I'd like to
> use them together, particularly for SPFLG. Putting them together, I have
> an effective monitor size of 3840 x 1200.  I believe this is still
> significantly smaller than what Frazer is using with his big monitor (??)
>
>
> When I start SPFLG and only one monitor is attached, it works fine.
> However, when I start SPFLG with two monitors, it comes up looking like
> I have it in zoomed mode - letters are large, and text goesdisplay
> region is also zoomed.  If I then remove one monitor, nothing happens -
> the zooming of the text stays.  I think the display of the data is not
> zoomed.
>
> I thought this might be related to not having enough shared memory
> available.  When I started this, I had shmmax set to 16777216. However,
> for 2 monitors, I need more than 2 x 1920 x 1200 x 4, or more than
> 18,432,000.   So, I reset the shmmax to 33,554,432.  I believe this
> meets all requirements (integer multiple of 4096 (= shmall), power of 2,
> bigger than needed for number of pixels). However, it doesn't fix the
> problem.  (Yes, I rebooted after changing the shmmax, and yes I checked
> that I typed the number correctly and that the number was changed at
> reboot.)
>
> Can you help?
>
>
> [I also have a problem with the window not showing on both monitors.
> That is, if I take a window - it can be the message window, the tv
> window, or the xterm window where I'm typing AIPS commands, and move it
> so it straddles the monitors, the minority part of the window is not
> visible.  This part does not appear to be AIPS - it happens on my laptop
> also, when not running AIPS.   But I wonder if it may have something to
> do with why the window is acting peculiarly across two monitors.]
>
>
> Also, I remember that there is a way to change the display size of the
> text on the TV, but I am not finding in my notes how to do that and
> haven't found it in the help files.  Can one of you remind me how to
> change the text size?

The verb you need is CHARMULT.   When XAS comes up with such a large TV 
it decides to multiply the character font by an integer.  On Frazer's TV 
the characters without this are really small.  Enter
     CHARM 1
and it will reduce the characters to normal size.

I have 2 monitors and, on RedHat 6, the windows slide across the break 
in just the way you would want them to.  Every part of the window is 
visible at all times even if broken vertically at some point.  The 
shared memory issue causes a failure as XAS tries to come up, not after 
it is already running.

I use $HOME/.Xdefaults to limit my AIPS TV to one of my screens most of 
the time.  That way the xterm and message windows and the TV do not have 
to conflict.

I have found that some tasks do not play well with CHARMULT > 1 on more 
ordinary screens (e.g. mine, yours with only 1200 in Y, etc.)  I have 
fixed some of them but I suspect there are more.  I will check out SPFLG.

Eric