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Two Headed Penguins?

Posted by Cliff on from the two-users-same-interface-same-processor dept.

dmendesf asks: "The Octane2 workstation from SGI has a neat trick called PowerDuo that enables a single station to be driven by 2 keyboards, 2 mice and 2 monitors. Is it possible to do the same with Linux and USB mice, keyboards plus Dual Head videoboards?" How difficult would it be to develop an X11 solution to do this? Now take this a step further: could this be done with the secondary machine a network connection away?

4 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. But first by netringer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    you'd need an O/S that was designed from the beginning to be multi-tasking and multi-user. ...something like...uhhhh...*nix!

    I don't get what the breakthrough is. Many moons ago I deployed and supported 400 users with 20" color screens and keyboards and mice, with the full office-like suite of applications (with shared licenses) all running off one or the other of two Sun 4/330's runing SunOS (BSD Unix) over 10BaseT. It was called "an X-terminal." It performed so well that users would favor them over PCs.

    The coolest thing was getting a shipment of 30 new desktops in the morning and having them all working in front of the users by lunch time. Those were the days...before we got this advanced new easy-to-deploy, easy-to-train stuff like Windows.

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  2. I don't see the point by billcopc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why struggle to have one expensive PC serve 2 users, when it would be trivial to just get 2 cheap boxen and run Cat-5 between them, like we've always done ?

    Sure, the concept is neat, but I don't see how practical this really is. If the person can afford this whiz-bang SGI box, they can probably afford two lesser SGI boxen instead. I don't expect the added space taken by the case to be a major issue, SGIs are usually quite slim.

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  3. Maybe... by uncledrax · · Score: 2, Interesting

    With only 1 box, you only have to worry about maintaining... 1 box.

    Also maybe the person only needs a second 'computer' occasionally.. or some other strange condition.
    (maybe they just want to know for the heck of it)

    Although you are correct that it may be more economical to have just multiple boxes.

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  4. How bout the same X session and two cursors? by danboy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think it would be really cool to run two seperate mice and keyboards on one X session.. that would make debugging with a coworker a breeze! Has anyone seen anything like this done? Kind of like timbuck2 or VNC, but on one local machine with two cursors.