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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."

3 of 496 comments (clear)

  1. Multi-headed Computer by pantherace · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I have looked at this... the problem is the way Linux handles the keyboard... To Linux, all keyboards are the same. If there was some way to either tell X to ignore all KBs except some, or have the kernel map them (say /dev/input/kb0 /dev/input/kb1) similar to how mice are done, this would not be a problem at all.

    Also, you don't need 4 cards, You could do it with two. NVidia's twinview allows you to run two seperate X-servers off of one card (provided of course that it has two outputs).

    1. Re:Multi-headed Computer by plaa · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Not relating directly to the above, but I think this may interest some people:

      When I got a dualhead card, I knew that I wanted two separate desktops, between which I can switch with a hotkey, not by scrolling the mouse to the other display (I wanted to use virtual desktops on both). I was astounded that I could find absolutely no way of doing this, and no references to it on the Net.

      The best I could do was make the screens separate and stop the mouse from going from the edge of one display to another, but then I found no way of moving the pointer to the other screen.

      After a few months I found a suitable function call in the X libraries and wrote a small program, switchscreen, to switch between the displays. Now I've got two totally separate desktops between which I can move with a simple alt-tab.

      You can read the details for configuring your X system like this in the README file included in the package.

      --

      I doubt, therefore I may be.
  2. Great gamer machine. No latency! by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This sounds like a multiplayer gamer configuration. Unlike most shared-CPU systems, everybody has a 3D video card, although they have to be PCI boards. With everybody on the same CPU, latency is a non-issue. Fast FPS games should synchronize perfectly. That tightly synchronized feel will make for much better head to head gameplay.