Hi, this is the README for pingx. I hope you like it and find it useful. I also hope that you will find problems or missing features and send me patches to fix/add them :)
pingx is really nice for seeing if a remote display is up (use the options "-q -c 1"). It even returns immediately instead of waiting a second like the ICMP ping utility does, in case you're the impatient type.
Why would you need to know if a remote display is up? Well, I need to know because I have three monitors and two of them are on a dual-head machine. I'm not sure whether the dual-head machine is running xinerama (http://sourceforge.net/projects/xinerama/) or not this week, so I'm unsure whether my center monitor is :0.1 or :0.0. This is important because I use x2vnc to control a third monitor over to the left, and if I give a bad DISPLAY variable to x2vnc it doesn't work :(
Clueful people will probably point out that I should make :0.0 my left monitor and put a "Screen 1 RightOf Screen0" statement in my XF86Config-4, but I thought that writing an X protocol-level ping utility might be a fun thing to do instead :)
It compiles under FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE and Linux ok. I got lazy and make different LDLIBS lines in the Makefile. I'll use autoconf/automake in the future, but just edit the Makefile for now.
You need to install the libgnugetopt port if you want to compile under FreeBSD.
Please send patches / feedback / beer to me, Jason. My address is thalakan@technologist.com. I'm particularly interested whether the RPM folks or a Debian person will package it first, because I'm debating whether to switch to Debian on some of my important machines.
The official website of pingx is:
http://lightconsulting.com/~thalakan/code.html#pingx
If you don't get it from there, you're putting your system at risk of getting trojaned. I haven't designated any mirror sites yet (but all requests to become one will be seriously considered).