Multiple Desktop Users on a Single Machine?

_Sharp'r_ asks: "I'm trying to design the least expensive way to make OpenOffice, email, and a web browser available to students in a new charter elementary school. In my past experience working with charitable computer donations, I can usually get three to four working computers out of five donated 'broken' computer systems, usually with plenty of monitors, keyboards and mice left over. I'd like to use one computer for multiple students by attaching multiple monitors, USB keyboards and mice. What drivers/OS versions support multiple local input devices and monitors that can be attached to a specific login session? Will this require virtualization? Is there a config I haven't found that you can use to assign these devices to specific ttys? Have you done this before?"

Comments

Yes, but is it worth it?

[MichaelSmith]

In theory (and practice) you can run two X servers on different graphics cards. Plug in multiple mice and keyboards. Configure two xorg.conf files. You will have to do both manually.

If you use USB you can easily plug in as many keyboards and mice as you want, but how will you know in advance which is which?

Looking at older hardware you could use PS/2 for the keyboards but I don't know if you can use two of them.

Another way might be to use a really old machine as an X terminal, and use a more powerful machine as the server. Personally I would use NetBSD on the terminal, and a good linux distro as the server because you want to have a nicely integrated desktop. Which is not to say BSD can't do that. I run BSD on my servers and ubuntu on my workstations.

At the end of the day, if saving a bit of cheap hardware means spending a lot on labour, then its probably not worth it.

Re:Yes, but is it worth it?

[mathew7]

It's pretty easy to configure an X server to distinguish between a USB mouse+keyboard, and PS2 mouse+keyboard and create 2 sessions. I think you can even do it using 1 Nvidia (or ATI) card with 2 outputs.
Since USB is dinamicaly allocating resources (IDs), I don't think you can put the same type of devices on one computer and expect to be mapped always to the same session, so going with a different configuration like I said before is risky.

Not likely with Windows

[Dan East]

At one point I did some extensive searching to find an application / driver that would allow even partial multiuser control over Windows. We have a multimedia PC with two video outputs, one of which is dedicated to projection. Due to the physical layout of our control room, there are two keyboards and mice attached to the computer. All I wanted was a utility that gave each mouse its own pointer, so that two people could interact with my two custom programs at once. I never could find anything providing even that simple functionality, and it wasn't necessary enough for me to implement it myself.

So, an Microsoft OS is most likely out of the question for what you want to do.

Dan East