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FourHead: One PC, Four Users

Posted by timothy on from the four-times-the-fun dept.

LoganGD writes "A reseach group from UFPR university in Brazil, C3SL has managed to make one Linux box run four terminals at the same time. That means four mice, keyboards, displays and users with just one CPU. The way they managed to do that can be found at the FourHead project webpage. The fact that one computer science laboratory can suport up to 60 users whit only 15 PCs is really attractive for low-resource groups and countries."

2 of 496 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The heat! The heat! by Arathrael · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not like the graphics cards are going to be pushed to the limit - I mean, the CPU wouldn't cope with them all playing ut2004 at the same time. :-) So they shouldn't be generating all that much heat, couple of case fans should cope with it no problems.

    As for the noise, it'll still be quieter than 4 separate boxes.

  2. Hate to burst your bubble... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    But not everyone runs top of the line NVIDIA cards. I imagine the cards in this box are probably low budget Geforce 2's. Probably MX 200's. Might even be lower cards then that, since why do they need hardware 3d?

    I don't think anyone could argue that these create massive amounts of heat. What heat they do create can easily be exhausted by a case fan.

    This is definitely a setup for an environment where people are literally running on a shoestring budget. This is a really nice ability, and I'm glad someone has done it.