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Neil Stone wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Grant Sewell wrote: >> Rob Beard wrote: >>> HI folks, >>> >>> When I was playing around with Kubuntu at work on one of our new Dell >>> PCs (Pentium D 820) I got wondering something. Would it be possible to >>> run two desktops at the same time on one PC? >>> >>> Now I know there have been products in the past that provide an extra >>> video output, keyboard, mouse and sound for Windows, but I wondered if >>> it could be done cheaply on Linux? >>> >>> What I was thinking of was... >>> >>> Standard PC (say a average sort of spec Pentium D or Athlon 64) with an >>> ample amount of memory (say 1GB). >>> An extra video card (say PCI 128MB Radeon card or similar). >>> An extra sound card (PCI cheapo sound card) >>> A USB keyboard and mouse and extra monitor. >>> >>> I wondered if it would be possible to run two copies of X and Gnome/KDE >>> etc on the one PC so one user is on the main monitor using the main >>> keyboard/mouse/sound card and a second user is on a second monitor with >>> a completely different desktop using the second video card, USB keyboard >>> and mouse and extra sound card? >>> >>> I'm thinking something a bit like LTSP but one one machine? >>> >>> Is it possible to have more than one USB keyboard and mouse on a PC and >>> then specify which one is used for input? >>> >>> If it is possible then I dare say it is another opportunity to put some >>> of these high powered desktop PCs to a more cost effective use. >>> >>> Rob >> I have regularly thought about this, but never actually got around to >> testing it out. >> >> You can certainly add the appropriate entries in your X config, you'd >> need 2 of everything mind... two mouse entries, two keyboard entries, >> two GFX card entries, two monitor entries, two "Screen" entries and two >> ServerLayout entries. >> >> You can definitely start a second X session easy enough... from the CLI. >> I regularly do. At a CLI, if you type "startx -- :1" (without the "" >> marks) then it'll load up another X session locally. If you wanted to >> start it on the second set of devices, then you could use "startx -- >> -layout OtherDevices :1" *should* work (if I've read the docs correctly). >> >> Making it do all this automagically on a "normal" distro is, however, >> going to be a touch more complex. Presuming, of course, that you want a >> login manager such as GDM to start on both screens. >> >> Grant. >> > > Yes thats about it in a nutshell.. I have used somthing like this > before... wasn't with USB which i can see as the only potential hurdle, > but still, doable. > > - -- > Neil Stone > > Systems Administrator > FlashTek UK USB shoudln't be a hurdle. So long as you know the order in which devices will be detected, you should be fine. For example, if I want X to take input from my trackpad (laptop) then I can tell it to read from: /dev/psaux /dev/input/mice /dev/input/mouse1 If X is set to /dev/input/mice, then any other pointing device (USB mouse) will also be read for the same input. However, if I specifically specify a unique device (/dev/input/mouse1) then any other pointing device (/dev/input/mouse2, for example) will be ignore by the X session using /dev/input/mouse1. So, it is possible to specify which pointing device each X session uses. The same is true for keyboards. The hard bit in this respect would be discovering which physical device is attached to which /dev/ device, and being confident that they will always use those device names. If you wanted to get really into it, you could hack around with the uDev rules to make it that each known keyboard is assigned unique names (such as /dev/mainkeyboard and /dev/extrakeyboard) and then use those unique names in your X config... but that might not be necessary. ;) Grant. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html