Slashdot Mirror
FourHead: One PC, Four Users
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."
Wow. Impressive.
Please tell me this is some sort of joke...
This thing has been done for decades with serial terminals and X-terminals and the sort.
I don't believe there was any other way to access one of the original Unix systems than with a serial termainal.
When it all boils down, it ends up being a bit cheaper to just use terminals, as you don't have to deal with the other costs of the project mentioned in the article, namely video cards and extra cabling.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Google doesn't do a particularly good translation of Portuguese computer jargon - it refers to Nvidia "plates", a "plate mother", PS/2 "doors", "slide bars" (I assume these are expansion slots) and the list goes on and on.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
It would seem relatively easy (USB sound devices, or cheap PCI sound cards) to add sound to each workstation.
samrolken
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wow, you really didn't bother even looking at the pretty pictures in the article, moreless reading all those big complicated letter-thingies, did you?
It is four terminals separately (similar to four thin clients connected to a server -- except that there are no clients, just keyboards, mice, and displays)
That means FOUR mice, keyboards, DISPLAYS and users with just one CPU.
Read the article and look at the pictures. They each get their own monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
Attach 10 X-terminals (based on some microcontroller or such) or 40 VT100's...
I don't see anything new - been possible for years. It's just some new fancy hardware to plug more of the same stuff into one PC.
As to displays you're limited with number of gfx cards you can plug in and heads in each card. Mice can work easily on multi-input serial ports. Getting multiple keyboards that don't act as "serial terminals" may be slightly trickier...
I've personally learned Linux in a computer lab with 20 terminals and 1 Linux PC. No problem here.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Your ignorance could have easily been cured if you read the article and saw the pictures that show 4 separate monitors for each user. :P
I think you mean, "pictures that show 4 seperate monitors, one for each user", you way would have 16 monitors
Multics and BSD users are currently giggling. Why is four terminals impressive, again? Even if you don't use USB to get around having to find a bunch of ports, a modern linux box using X ought to be able to host dozens of terminals.
StoneCypher is Full of BS