X11 "Toggle Full Screen" in Leopard?
October 27th, 2007 by admin
So, if anyone out there has installed Leopard and X11, could you leave a comment if you can enable full screen mode and then successfully “Toggle Full Screen?” The menu item becomes active when I enable the option in preferences and restart X11, but when I choose it simply does nothing when I try it. So, I’m stuck in non-full-screen mode. I don’t know if this is a bug in Leopard or just a problem I’m having.
It’s happening in both my user accounts though.
Update – More on X11 So, Apple has apparently changed more than a few things about X11. For example, if you know type “xterm” in the regular Apple terminal it won’t crap out and give a “can’t get to display error” but it launches X11 and runs the xterm. That’s cool. But, the full screen thing problem persists.
Update II They’re also doing some weird mojo on the DISPLAY variable, it’s set to something like /tmp/launch-onrFOA/:0 and that confused the heck of out ds9. I was able to fix it by setting to display to :0.0 like … well, it normally would be.
.
Phil Dennison Says
I played with X11 yesterday at an Apple store and found also that it seems to produce blank white windows if opened in 256 color mode. Can anyone else confirm this? I need 256 colors for my main remote application.
I was surprised to see that X11 seemed to be installed by default on the demo machines, with 10.4 it was an optional install.
Phil.
Oct 27th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Niels Says
I cannot get fullscreen mode to work either. I enabled it in the preferences and then try to toggle but nothing happens. It works fine on 10.4 – that’s very annoying. I do most of my work in X11 fullscreen
Niels.
Oct 27th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Marcos Says
Yeah me too. Must be a bug. Let’s hope it gets fixed soon. I use X11 full screen pretty much exclusively. (Of course my work Mac is going to stay on TIger indefinitely for now anyway.)
Oct 28th, 2007 at 1:57 am
Jessica Says
I am just curious as to why everyone uses X11 full screen? Are there particular X11 astronomy applications that need this? Mostly, I use the Terminal app and X11 is only there for display purposes for PyRAF, etc.
In my .cshrc file in Tiger I use some script trickery to set the DISPLAY parameter correctly in Terminal. Anyone have any idea if this is going to work in Leopard with all the changes to how DISPLAY gets set?
Oct 31st, 2007 at 3:37 pm
John Says
I need X11 to connect to my remote server. And that needs to be done fullscreen since otherwise I can’t see the panels… Connecting to it in non-fullscreen mode is not letting my type at the login either :-/ I stuck with ssh I guess…
Nov 4th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Marcos Says
How are you connecting to this remote server exactly? is it VNC? or some Xterminal log in sort of thing (i forget the acronym, xdrb? xdm? )
Nov 4th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Ross Says
Same problem here. I’ve tried all sorts to get X11 working in fullscreen. The reason I want to use full screen is that I want to run a gnome-session on a remote linux box by logging in with ssh and with the X forwarding flag set. Individual apps started via the ssh login run fine, but gnome-session craps out. Hopefully the update which is rumoured to be due early Feb will fix it.
Jan 26th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Leonard Says
I’m confirming Phil’s observation about blank white xterm windows. I’m trying to run IDL with an 8-bit pseudocolor visual on my Mac Mini running Leopard. All the windows that come up, be they xterm, xman, xlogo, IDL… are white-on-white / blank. They work, as I can type commands in the blind in the xterm. ==Leonard
Feb 2nd, 2008 at 10:00 am
Marcos Says
Have you all tried the latest unofficial build?
http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/xquartz/wiki/X112.1.3
That would be my first suggestion, on these blank xterm problems.
Feb 3rd, 2008 at 12:17 am
peter Says
Hello,
pelase, please, guys, tell me that the full screen mode is fixed under new mac os x systems, i just bought new macbook and i can see that the full screen mode is NOT working and i cant belive it!! help!! i really really need it!!
peter
Jul 1st, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Marcos Says
Nope, sorry – still not working. It’s looking grim that it’s going to get implemented. The current maintainer of X11 at Apple has admitted it’s beyond his abilities; apparently it used a lot of trickery and moving to the new codebase he hasn’t been able to get it working.
Not looking good either for when it’s due to be fixed: http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/ticket/7
Jul 6th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
Dustin Says
“The current maintainer of X11 at Apple has admitted it’s beyond his abilities; “
I find this pretty sad. Mac changes over to Intel, which runs X11 no problem on almost any machine, and somehow things become more difficult? (I’m assuming that the new codebase referred to is the codebase for 10.5? Even if that is the case, you’d think the people at Apple would have the resources and brains to get something as important as this fixed (especially the way they now advertise their UNIX underpinnings as a selling point). I don’t NEED fullscreen, personally, but the way I see it, if you don’t have a working fullscreen mode, you don’t have a working X11, and the fact that Apple is now including X11 as a default install suggests to me that Apple may realize that many people are using the open source technologies on X11, now.)
Aug 2nd, 2008 at 5:11 am
Marcos Says
Most people who I talk to about X11 never use full screen – I seem the only one who likes to use it and the enlightenment (on another windows manager) rather than the standard “rootless” approach.
The “new codebase” means they moved from Xfree86 to X.org – the codebase is the open-source foundation of X11 that powers X11 on Linux, OS X, and most places. xfree86 went away, and it was replaced by X.org – so that’s where free X11 distributions come from now (on Linux too)
But the codebase changes broke full screen, and whatever they were doing to make full screen was apparently tricky, and thus we still don’t have it.
Ironically, I’m now getting by (mainly because I have two monitors now) with the rootless version ,but I do miss the enlightenment and virtual desktops now and then. (I guess I have spaces too)
Aug 25th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
BowchickaWOWWOW Says
Yuppers, doesn’t work for me either, when I made X11 go fullscreen, I have this grey background, the top menu bar on my iMac dissappears, and I can’t toggle it on and off, so I have to force quit using command Q. Anyone?
Aug 23rd, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Jim Says
With some playing I think I found what you are looking for. To get Gimp working at all, I first had to edit /usr/x11/bin/xstart and change defaultserverargs=”-dpi 1″ (look up the commands for vi is you don’t know them) (from Finder/applications/terminal if you didn’t know that) Then I had also set fullscreen mode. To set it back, use command-, (command comma) to get the x11 menu. Select Preferences. Uncheck “full Screen” mode.
That should take care of it.
Oct 16th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Jim Says
…sorry I meant /usr/x11/bin/startx
Oct 16th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
David Shoemaker Says
I was able to go into preferences for X11 and check the “Full screen mode” check box. As it says next to the check box, cmd option a now toggles full screen mode for me.
HTH.
Nov 25th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
David Shoemaker Says
That is, hold down command and option, then press A, to toggle.
Nov 25th, 2009 at 8:36 pm