Run on Small Screen with Linux

Resize fixed size windowed application to make it usable also into small screens

Sometimes the application cannot be smallest that a limit, and sometimes we have very small screen (for example in some raspberry applications) and the application is largest than the screen, to solve this issue I made this guide.

example of scaled and unscaled view on the small screen

Prepare and exec

Exist a prepared script on git that we can use to run before our program so start from download it and get executiom permissions:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kaueraal/run_scaled/master/run_scaled
chmod +x run_scaled

Now install the requirements:

# opensuse
sudo zypper in xpra
# ubuntu mint debian
sudo apt install xpra

Now we can run a probram (in my case it is called com.github.subhadeepjasu.ensembles) but you can run firefox or any other command line that run a ui application, you also must specify --scale with a scaling factor:

./run_scaled.sh --scale=0.71 com.github.subhadeepjasu.ensembles

Conclustions

This command is usefull if you have a very small screen, but in my case it do not recognize opencl so I have a slower user experience, but for some application that have fixed size into a small screen it can be very usefull.