The last three days of my vacation were filled with further work and progress on my various X11 workplaces at home.
The xfce-terminal(1) scrolls awfully slow when run
on the NCD X terminal. "awfully" as in "unusable". A standard
xterm is absolutely zippy. Perhaps the
xfce-terminal tries to do "smooth scrolling" instead
of "jump scrolling" and I'm just missing an option? Well, I cannot
find any.
xterm -dc = dynamicColors: false is
very helpful when migrating screen(1) sessions between
X servers with different color depths. A small but working
set of stock colors is certainly preferable to something that turns
into (almost) "white-on-white" on another display.
Old news: the 1024x768 monitor is nicely usable if no pixel is wasted on desktop manager bars or window titles. twm(1) with a very frugal .twmrc setup to the rescue... it worked 25 years ago, it still works today.
Good news: in addition to its Xfce session,
lightdm automatically offered a TWM
session after an aptitude install twm. Even better:
the Default Xsession entry refers to the good old
method of refering to your ~/.xsession script if you
have one.
My old twm-based setup is so simple but efficient
that I decided to ditch xfce on the new, big FullHD monitor,
too.
Bad news: after switching to my twm .xsessions, the
monitor wouldn't receive any HDMI video signal anymore next
morning. And this effect repeated. Nothing but a reboot would
recover the signal. xset -dpms avoids this problem,
now part of my .xsession.
(Warning: After logout, lightdm will restart the X
server and thusly re-active DPMS, falling into the trap again. I'll
need to prevent this at the xorg.conf level.)
Albeit being half the age of the NCD Explora 451, the IGEL
LX3320 X terminal susan doesn't grok the
lightdm login box. The lettering on the buttons is
missing, and the XDMCP connection will reset after about three
seconds. This problem should be be resolvable but will likely
require some quiet day dedicated to it.
I installed dillo and midori as
light-weight browsers. firefox/iceweasel crawls insanely slow to
the NCD...
Every now and then, somebody from the Internet will probe the NCD on port 5900, these days mostly the port for VNC but on the NCD the port for the "X Remote" protocol; which requires an extra license the NCD tries to obtain -- which will fail and require me to ACK an error message popping up. This can turn into a nuisance and needs some fix pretty soon. But not now.
Summary: major headways into ubiqituous noiseless desktopping at home. (There are two more IGEL terminals and TFT screens waiting to be taken into service.)