GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 577394
Workspace rotate/switcher automation
Last modified: 2009-03-31 23:21:05 UTC
(I apologize I didn't know which sections to put this under given the two menus on the screen before) Related to my use case here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352294#c14 It would be fantastic if there was a way to have an automatic switch from each workspace to the next in x seconds. This should work very much like a store surveillance camera setup does. So it's on workspace 1 for 10 seconds, then switches to 2 for 10 seconds and then 3 and 4 and back to 1 again infinitely. Combined with xtrlock or ideally a transparent screensaver, this makes monitoring various logs and process "top" (or "mtop"), "w", etc. much easier as you can see 4 times (or more) the number of screens without having to manually keep switching them. Ideal for displaying on a LCD/CRT/Plasma/Projector in a N.O.C. scenario. Currently, we need to have multiple DVI/VGA outputs from a single computer to 4 LCD displays. Given the "green movement", we could reduce the carbon emissions greatly if we only used a single display. (Ideally this would work with or without compiz, however we'll take what we can get at this point in time)
You can do this with wmctrl and a simple shell script: http://tripie.sweb.cz/utils/wmctrl/ Try "wmctrl -s <workspace number>"
For the slideshow I use firefox with the tab slideshow addon. Firefox's base "fullscreen" mode leaves some border pixellation on many high-res monitors and LCD TVs (this is for a wall display in the ERDC DSRC executive suite) so I also use the fullerscreen firefox addon. For the locker I finally just used the old source for alock, stripping most of it out (everything except the modal grab that provides transparent lock functionality).
(In reply to comment #1) > You can do this with wmctrl and a simple shell script: > > http://tripie.sweb.cz/utils/wmctrl/ > > Try "wmctrl -s <workspace number>" Or the awesome wnckprop which comes with libwnck ;-)
I took that idea and ran with it Owen... http://www.daevid.com/content/examples/snippets.php scroll down to "Automatic Monitoring of remote servers" I still think that Gnome workspace should have this feature built in, but I suppose this 'hack' is good enough for my current needs.