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Re: [LUG] debian code names

 

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...

Gordon

Not 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

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