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Accepted
nanofarad
Asked: 2012-06-12 14:46:54 +0800 CST

How do I get an application to display on a "dummy monitor"?

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I have a GTK program which I would like to run from a console in one of the virtual terminals (over SSH, and locally). Is there a way to get this application(or any other GTK application, for future reference) to display to a dummy monitor instead of erring about this?

Note that I do not want to use a CLI version--not all GTK programs have CLI versions.

gtk

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Is there a way to get this application ... to display to a dummy monitor ...

    One word, literally: xvfb

    NAME
       Xvfb - virtual framebuffer X server for X Version 11

DESCRIPTION
       Xvfb is an X server that can run on machines with no 
display hardware and no physical input devices.  It emulates
a dumb framebuffer using virtual memory.

The X community has found many other novel uses for Xvfb,
including ... providing an unobtrusive way to run 
applications that don't really need an X server but 
insist on having one anyway.
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