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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?"
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree-Local-multi-user-HOWTO /index.html
The HOWTO is a bit dated, but it is probably relevant enough to get you on the right track.
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
You could run multiple versions of XWindows using different configuration files.
In the configuration file you specify where the input devices come from and how you graphics card is setup so it should be faily easy to get one instance of X pointing to one KVM combination and one to the other.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html/ 14-Multiseat-X-Under-X11R6.97.0.html0 0126OSDTHL
http://www.google.com/search?q=multiseat+x
http://cs.senecac.on.ca/~ctyler/ruby/
http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives
http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/20051207
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html
:)
Not all good news though, seems it was a bit unstable. Still, it's a start.
Check this out: http://www.linuxtoys.org/multiseat/multiseat.html
This level of salvage is a labor of love. There is quite a lot of open box work happening anyway. I agree with yours and other posts that X11 is the way to go. There are a lot of schools that get junk as donations and this kind of creativity is something to be admired.s -selling-solar.html
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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
Better known as 318230.
You're thinking of nComputing and they're still around: http://www.ncomputing.com/ They have a nice hardware setup that allows up to 30 users on a single PC, and it runs on Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, and Linux. You can also find them on TigerDirect http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTool s/search.asp?keywords=ncomputing&image1.x=0&image1 .y=0
but is a different way to stretch junk hardware.
Have you looked at Linux Terminal Server Project? Any old junk makes an adequate client, memory requirements are something like 64MB.
There's an there's an active LTSP community, including guys use it in schools: www.k12ltsp.org.
Edubuntu will do this out of the box for you. It's designed specifically for this sort of situation.
As an alternative, why net take the best parts and build a decent server, and then build as many thin clients as you can make. That way you can also lock down the thin clients and only have to maintain software on the server.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Get one server quality computer and load it up with Ram. The rest of the machines will be thin clients and can be just about anything down to a Pentium I. You can even run the machines diskless. You'll want a good 10/100 switch and at least a 100Mb NIC in the server. There will be a lot of information traveling across your network. I've done setups like this for kids in similar situations with donated hardware. One cool thing about this is that the students have the same experiences no matter what machine they sit down and log into. They don't have to be at one particular machine because that is where they saved their work. Definitely check it out. There is also a K-12 version for kids. Good luck. http://www.ltsp.org/ http://www.k12ltsp.org/
http://userful.com/
I used this to set up 8 workstations (virtual art galleries, actually) out of two machines for a tattoo shop across town. I've followed some of the resources already linked on this topic and was never able to get such a setup working, but this software did it just fine. All you need are some dual-head video cards and USB hubs.
You're right on the money with this, and you can do it roughly based on the port (effectively) as often pairs of ports represent separately enumerated buses. I use:
" 03",SYSFS{bInterfaceProtocol}="02",NAME="input/%k" ,SYMLINK="input/evmouse-%b"" 03",SYSFS{bInterfaceProtocol}="01",NAME="input/%k" ,SYMLINK="input/evkbd-%b"
KERNEL="event*",BUS="usb",SYSFS{bInterfaceClass}=
KERNEL="event*",BUS="usb",SYSFS{bInterfaceClass}=
To persistently name the devices attached.
jh
Are you sure about that? AFAIK, what Edubuntu provides is LTSP, which allows you to run one machine with a bunch of thin clients attached to it, but each of the thin clients requires another PC. That's not the same as attaching multiple monitors and keyboards directly to one computer.
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