[Gllug] Multiple X servers

[rich at annexia.org]

On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 02:10:26PM +0000, Peter Childs wrote:
> 	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 think this solution is only really practical when you have a
number of users in close proximity to the machine. Hence my original
suggestions: the Internet cafe and school/university labs. It
doesn't look like cabling length would be an issue for <= 4 users
per PC. Above that number there are plenty of other limiting factors.

> 	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 standard PC should be able to take 1 AGP card and 3 or 4 PCI cards
(depending on whether the mobo has ethernet built in).

If your PCI cards have two monitor outputs then you'll probably only
need 2 cards in total to drive 4 monitors.

> 	I think the biggestB problem is that X11 is a bit heavy weight.

The real factor in this seems to be can we persuade a single
X server to drive all the heads? Answer: probably, with some
software modifications.

The advantages of sharing a single PC are:

* less system administration required
* applications share memory/cache

I actually have two monitors on the computer I'm using at home, and
I might go out and buy a cheap USB keyboard and mouse and see how
feasible it is to get two heads working.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Red Hat Inc. (London, UK) http://www.redhat.com/software/ccm
http://www.annexia.org/ Freshmeat projects: http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj

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