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On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Rob Beard wrote:
On 16/07/10 15:54, Gordon Henderson wrote:On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Paul Sutton wrote:Myself and Neil stone (I think) were looking at if it would be possible to install woody or something around woody, then do an update thing to the next release up to the current stable release., just as a bit of fun.<snip>Personally, I'd not bother unless you're bored one afternoon... GordonNot really how I'd want to spend my afternoon :-)Okay that's coming from someone who tried to learn Z80 assembler on an Amstrad CPC emulator.What I would like to do something is investigate multi-seat X, that is having two monitors, two keyboards and two mice (and maybe two soundcards) attached to one machine and creating two 'independent' desktops which can be used (kind of in a way like LTSP but with only one machine and no server).I've been looking into it but I've had so much on my plate and a lack of space and hardware that I haven't really done much about it. I did try and get it working a couple of years back but had no joy. However maybe if a few of us got together one day with some hardware we could possibly get something up and running. Something like this could possibly be a great way of using resources, such as when a reasonable spec (say Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Pentium 4) PC is donated to somewhere we could turn the one machine into two machines.
It ought to be possible.You'll need a seconds keyboard and mouse (USB or old serial?) and a system with 2 graphics cards.
Trouble is - if doing it on old hardware, I suspect it'll struggle. A modern distribution will likely require a lot of tweaking to start a 2nd. independant X server. (And a 2nd graphics card)
And I can't recall any existing hardware that worked that way anyway (thinking of old Suns, HP, SGIs, etc.)
You might make it work by using some sort of virtualisation and giving each host access to it's own graphics/keboard/mouse. If that works, you could probably have as many desktops as you've got slots to plug graphics cards into... (Assuming you can share the USB bus somehow).
Can't say it's a project that enthuses me though :)I do have half a dozen 'thin client' PCs that have been returned with faulty PSUs though.... They have 1GB of RAM and have 1GHz VIA processors in them... Not sure about the graphics hardware might boot one up to find out... I ran them off flash IDE drives....
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq