Pingx is a software tool that measures the speed of your connection to the X server using XNoOp(3x) call. Its utility helps you ascertain the smoothness of your connection.
One of the best things about pingx is that it is highly useful for checking if a remote display is up. You can use the "-q -c 1" options for this purpose, and the software even returns immediately to cater to the impatient type who can't wait for the ICMP ping utility to finish checking the remote display. Knowing whether a remote display is up comes in handy for a variety of reasons, such as when setting up multiple monitors.
For instance, if you have three monitors and two of them are connected to a dual-head machine, you may be unsure whether the machine is running xinerama or not. This knowledge is crucial as it determines whether your center monitor is :0.1 or :0.0. The wrong DISPLAY variable means that tools such as x2vnc do not work as intended. While you could set :0.0 as your left monitor and put a "Screen 1 RightOf Screen0" statement in your XF86Config-4 file, writing an X protocol-level ping utility is a much more exciting option.
The software supports both FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE and Linux, although the Makefile requires manual editing. The current version of pingx is the initial release, which comes with count, verbose, and quiet flags. While statistics and a signal handler are yet to be written, the developers plan to integrate them soon. Overall, pingx is a reliable utility that makes it easy to monitor your X server's performance and determine whether remote displays are up.
Version 1.0: N/A