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Just got a new laptop and installed ubuntu on it. I have an old one that also runs ubuntu.

Is there a way I can use the old laptop as an additional screen for the work I do on my new laptop?

I saw some solutions for Windows, but who wants to use Windows.

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Here is a really, really hacky way (and only a high-level description) of doing this.

  1. On the new laptop use xrandr to increase the size of the screen to cover both monitors. If each laptop is 1920x1080 you would run:

    xrandr --fb 3840x1080
    

    If one screen is bigger, pick the biggest dimensions or you'll cut some off.

  2. Run a VNC server on your new laptop. xllvnc is nice and supports clipping (amongst other things). Clipping allows you to send just the portion of the screen you want to and in this case we want to send the stuff we can't see on the first screen:

    x11vnc -clip 1920+1080+1920+0
    
  3. Run a VNC client on the old laptop. Assuming you set the resolution correctly in step 2, just make it fullscreen and bam, you're done.

This is going to give you relatively awful performance (you can tweak this in the x11vnc command) and artefacts (from the jpeg compression) but it should just about work.


A better solution (in my mind) would be ripping the screen off the old laptop and buying a controller board for it and just plugging it into the external display port on the new laptop.

That or flog the old laptop and buy a monitor. They're not expensive.

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  • Thanks @oli .. i was looking at something like the xrandr solution since my old laptop is not too bad .. however xrandr is not able to set the double resoultion .. my screen resolution is 1600x900 but when i do xrandr --fb 1600x900 it does not change...i am able to set it to other allowable sizes however ..... Aug 10, 2013 at 19:15
  • @ShrikantKhadilkar my point was you make it the size of your monitor plus your old laptop's monitor. My example assumes two 1080p screens.
    – Oli
    Aug 10, 2013 at 20:53

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