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Andrew Bolster
Asked: 2010-07-25 15:28:04 +0800 CST

Recording remote xserver output without x-forwarding

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Any ideas for essentially creating a loop-back display on a remote server, so I run a X application, and instead of forwarding that display to a local client, the output is essentially 'screen-grabbed', just without a screen?

Explanation: High performance visualizations (read:pretty pretty pictures) with no interactivity needed while I'm 3000 miles away.

linux unix x11 x11forwarding

1 Answers

  1. This is one approach you might use:

    X Virtual frame buffer: http://www.x.org/archive/X11R6.8.1/doc/Xvfb.1.html

    As an example, the following sequence of commands runs the virtual framebuffer
as display ":1", run a program on it, and capture the virtual screen in
the file image.xwd:

Xvfb :1 &
xv -display :1 &
xwd -display :1 -root -out image.xwd

    Examplecommands from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvfb

    ImageMagik is capable of most things:

    convert screen.xwd foo.png
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