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develCuy's blog

by Fernando Paredes García


Multiseat, Multiterminal, Green computer/computing

It is sad to me that my old compaq nx9030 has been sold :( but thanks to God now I have a new Toshiba a205-s5804. This baby is running with Debian sid amd64 kernel because his Dual Core T2330 processor supports EMT64.

Seems powerful right?, well, my wife used the old laptop until has been sold, and now we got "fighting" to use the new toshiba... then, in order to preserve my marriage and aid the hearth by saving energy cost, we decided to use it at the same time, how?

Multiseat is not a new word, I've tried it 5 years ago when Xfree86 was really free and Xorg did not existed. But unfortunately, that time I had to compile kernel, do patches, etc, did not get working it... and well, that was only a practice game.

The nice part of OpenSource is that almost EVERYTHING is free or is going to be free, so the way I used was to discover what my computer is able to do and then get in count that some software method should work nowadays. Which alternatives there are for linux today? userful.com(cost money) and the hard way: test and error(cost time).

And that software method works nicely:

[PHOTO comming soon]

All this thanks to a wonderful HOWTO at netpatia

There is also a more complex but helpful Wiki Book

[ISSUES]
Yes, nothing is perfect!
1. Sometimes my second screen starts in black, so I have to switch to VT1 and then go back to VT7: ctrl+alt+F1, wait and then ctrl+alt+F7
2. My mice wheels don't work, perhaps some evdev bug
3. My touchpad does not work, so I have to use 2 mice, or add the param: -host-cursor to one of the Xephyr servers, the problem is that the pointer stays in "x", which is confusing but at least works if you have some emergency or forgot the extra USB.

That is all, hope you enjoy it.

Blessings!


Multiseat

The easiest way to do free multi-seat is to use http://userful.com/products/free-2-user As the link says it's a free 2 user license.


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