Get informed about display changes - x11

I know about the libxrandr library but reading out newly attached monitor/display information, like available resolutions, requires polling.
Is there a way, in a CPP program, to get informed about changes on attached displays without asking RandR every x seconds?

At least if you are using Gnome and Mutter you can listen to the dbus signals of Mutter.
Example of a dbus method in the same namespace:
dbus-send --session --print-reply --dest=org.gnome.Mutter.DisplayConfig /org/gnome/Mutter/DisplayConfig org.gnome.Mutter.DisplayConfig.GetCurrentState
Use a DBus viewer to find the signal you are looking for.
I don't know a solution for any other window manager

Related

Which frameworks am I allowed to link to from a macOS launch daemon?

I'm writing a macOS launch daemon (in C++). It works for the most part, except that I am noticing some random crashes via SIGABRT (in the log.)
I've asked earlier about the use of the Core Graphics framework, which it turns out was not allowed in a launch daemon. I removed it, but I still get very rare crashes.
Thus I'm wondering which of the following frameworks am I allowed to use from a launch daemon?
There's no technical restriction on specific frameworks you're allowed or not allowed to link. Merely linking a library will not cause crashes. Some APIs need to be called from specific contexts, such as much of Core Graphics only making sense if a process is part of a windowing session, as you've found out. But even there, some of the off-screen drawing APIs which don't interface with the windowing system directly ought to work from a Launch Daemon context.
If you're seeing crashes calling specific APIs, you'll need to investigate those one by one. If you're seeing "random" crashes, I suspect you have a bug (memory overwrite? multithreading error?) in your code. Note that Apple's toolchain provides a bunch of different diagnostic options which you can use even when not running in the debugger, such as ASan, UBSan, and Thread Sanitizer. These may help you track down issues.
As you've specifically tagged this question with the IOKit tag and it's shown in your screenshot, I'll add that using IOKit from a launch daemon is very common. It's even possible to use IOKit matching events as a launch trigger for the daemon using XPC events/xpc_set_event_stream_handler - this way, your daemon can be started on-demand when a specific (type of) device is connected, for example. (As opposed to starting up at every system boot and consuming system resources even if it's not needed or doing anything.)

How to activate / enable the process notification feature in API Monitor?

API Monitor has a feature to automatically watch for a new process starting and ask if you want to monitor it. However I have not been able to get this to actually work. The only option in the program I can find which seems to be related is the File menu "Pause Process Notifications" option. However, this is disabled which gives me the impressions that it can't be turned off but also that it is supposed to work automatically "out of the box". But whenever I start a new process, nothing happens.
Specifically I'm referring to the feature described here:
Process Notification
API Monitor intercepts process creation and allows you to select the
process for monitoring. Each time a process is created by the system,
a notification window is displayed with options to monitor, skip or
terminate the process. This is especially useful for monitoring
processes with a short lifespan or processes that are automatically
launched in the background. Process Notification can also be used to
monitor applications such as consent.exe (UAC prompt), which run on a
different desktop.
The following screenshot shows an example of the Process Notification
window that is displayed when launching an application that requires
elevation
I've tried both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of API Monitor (Version 2.0 Alpha-r13) running both as regular user and as admin; makes no difference.
How can this feature be activated?
The specific reason I'd like to use this feature is that I have process A which starts process B, and it is B I need to monitor. A and B each run for only a few seconds so I can't manually get it to monitor fast enough.
Finally after reading through API Monitor forums I found some information. Unfortunately (for now at least) it seems the answer is that this feature no longer works (since Windows 8.1).
As posted on http://www.rohitab.com/discuss/topic/40418-process-notification-on-81/?p=10093378
rohitabPosted 11 October 2013 - 03:38 AM
Due to security related changes in Windows 8.1, the Process
Notifications feature of API Monitor does not work. I will try to
resolve this issue as soon as possible and post a hotfix.
But a later update in 2014 indicated that it hadn't been fixed yet, and seems not to have been since then either.
It was implied that running in a Windows 7 (or 8.0?) virtual machine might be a workaround, or obviously finding another tool which has this capability.

How to disable sleep in MacOS while processing program is running?

I created a digital full screen Clock in Processing. I also created a executable file to run it directly via double click. My OS is MacOS High Sierra. When I run it, my laptop goes to sleep after some time. I want to disable sleeping while my clock is running. Is there a programming way to do this.
One option would be to use Amphetamine to do this. It's not programmatic though, which might not be possible from Processing (unless you can do Objective C style calls).

How do I get the Process Serial Number of my own process?

I am trying to install an event tap for my own process to intercept mouse events.
For this I found the function CGEventTapCreateForPSN which expects a process' serial number as its first parameter. How do I get the PSN of my own process? GetCurrentProcess is deprecated, GetProcessInformation has also been removed.
I know about CGEventTapCreate but from what I understand that installs a system-wide hook and that doesn't sound like a good idea or something I'd like to do. I also know about CGEventTapCreateForPid but I can't use that because I am also targeting older MacOSX versions that don't have that function and it also appears to be undocumented so who knows when it will go away.
FYI, I don't own the actual program, my code is only loaded into the process as a dynamic library so I cannot just modify the program's code or anything like that.

SMS war continues, ideas welcome

I am trying to make U9 telit modem send SMS messages. I think I handle protocol correctly, at least, I manage to send them, but only under these circumstances: the native application was executed beforehand, and killed by task manager (without giving it a chance to initialize things).
It looks like the supplied application is good at doing certain initialization/deinitialization which is critical. I also see the difference between the two states in output of AT+CIND command. When I am trying to do things on my own, it returns zeroes (including signal quality), but when I run the same command after killing the native application, the output looks reasonable.
I am out nearly of ideas. I have tried many things, including attempts to spy at modem's COM ports (didn't work). Haven't tried setting windows hooks to see what the application is trying to get thru.
Perhaps you have encountered a similar situation?
Agg's "Advanced Serial Port Monitor" actually helped a lot. Sometimes it caused blue screen, but it helped uncover secret commands which seem to help. AT+PCFULL is not described anywhere on the net, for example. The real trigger of non-operatio was AT+CFUN, the power disable/standby feature.
Also, it appeared that we have more issues. At first, the modem appears on the bus only as disk drive. It doesn't want to appear as any other devices before the drivers are installed. So, the U9 Telit software sends an IOCTL to disk driver to tell the modem to reappear as more devices (modem, 3 serial ports, another disk drive).

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