Thanks for the pixels [LWN.net]

Thanks for the pixels

Posted Jul 20, 2005 5:55 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165)
Parent article: The 2005 Linux Kernel Developers' Summit

My aging eyes thank you for the hi-res image. Was Iñaky Perez Gonzalez there? I'm not sure I'd recognize him any more. (Hi Iñaky, sorry for losing touch.)

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Where I can rant and whine on Linus Torvals?

Posted Aug 23, 2007 1:02 UTC (Thu) by marraco (guest, #46950) [Link]

I need to shake Linus to make him include kernel support for multiple mouses and multiple keyboards.

We have today multiple monitor. That way you can use two monitors, but I need to give the second monitor to other people, give them the second keyboard and mouse, and have many users on one machine.

I can do that today, only in windows, using BetWin. But I can´t make it in Linux, and kernel developpers are guilty.

I just would love to stalk kernel developpers, and cry "do THAT. DO THAT".

Microsoft do not want to do it, because it would make for less OS licenses sold.
If you have little money, you can pirate Windows XX, but you cannot pirate hardware. So Linux being free is not a massive real world money saving, but supporting many users on one computer (in the real world, not for deep hacker geeks) would make linux a deep money saving choice... And Microsoft can´t match it.

Kernel Does Support Many Input Devices

Posted Aug 23, 2007 2:08 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]

The kernel is not the problem here. The problem is your configuration of the X server.

My laptop has seven input devices listed by the kernel. The built-in keyboard, the trackpad, the external USB keyboard and mouse and various special buttons.

I configure X to use all of these on one display, but X could also be configured to run different servers with different input devices for each server.

Try copying your /etc/X11/xorg.conf to a new filename, change its Input sections, and run a second X server on virtual terminal 8 using the new config file.

As for console sessions, I don't remember the name of the program, but you use the same trick with framebuffer displays and a user-space console manager. The manager program reads input from the specified devices and draws it to the framebuffer. A full-screen xterm makes more sense to me though.