[Gllug] Multiple X servers

[Peter Childs]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2002 rich at annexia.org wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 11:06:48AM +0000, Alain Williams wrote:
> > Agreed. The support costs for a small number of these will be high. If we
> > can do it a few times, provide reliable/easy HOWTOs, and get the major distros
> > to support it - costs would drop. -- this is my eventual goal.
> 
> Red Hat might be interested in this.
> 
> Rich.
> 
> 

	Fine hmm problem.

	Cable. Unless all your machines happens to be sitting on the same 
desk your going to need loads of Cable. (Monitor + USB I guess) Your also 
going to need to have some code that associates monitors, mice and 
keyboards together so the computer knows keyboard a mouse a and screen a 
are all together.
	I suspect the limiting factor in reality is the number of Graphics 
cards you can plug in to one machine probably limited by the number of PCI 
sockets you have. (Unless graphics can be done over USB in which case 
128/3 = 40ish)
	A good starting place would be to have a look at the current Linux 
Thin Clients. http://www.ltsp.org/.
	Thin clients are not a new idea. they just went out of favour and 
are now coming back. 
	Come on we have a Bull DPS6 that talks to 64 serial terminals 
fine. 
	I have seen Unix boxes running with 140 users (congruently) 
students running Java, C++ etc... admittedly when more than 80 were around 
life got quite slow. (Oh it was a Sun SPARC 10) (In this case the clients 
were Windows Boxes or other unix boxes)
	I think the biggestB problem is that X11 is a bit heavy weight.

Peter Childs


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