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Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 FeaturePoettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 FeaturePosted May 7, 2012 3:51 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (subscriber, #755)Parent article: Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature
Wow...
it sure is good to hear that Fedora has figured out how to have multiple users on a Unix box.
(1993, PCs Limited 386/16, 6MB RAM, 19 users)
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Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 7, 2012 5:00 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Assuming you are merely ignorant and haven't read the blog post at all, multi-seat != multi-user
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 8, 2012 1:07 UTC (Tue) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]
Well, Poettering is still reinventing old, old technology. Multi-head Unix boxes have been around for decades.
The big problem was that even serial terminals were ridiculously overpriced, more expensive than just buying a cheap PC and running a terminal emulator. And actual X terminals were insanely expensive.
You can sort of argue that these weren't 'multihead', because the video signal was generated by the terminal, but I don't think that's a good way to define it. All the processing still happened on the host. Serial terminals were mostly pretty stupid, with the exception of some, um, I think it was Tektronix models that had bit-addressable graphics. There was a fair bit more to an X terminal, as it was actually running the X server locally, but it was still really 'multihead' in most senses. The terminal wouldn't do anything by itself, it was just a smart display device for its attached machine.
It looks like Poettering's solution isn't really 'true' multihead either. It's still the same basic idea, but running over USB instead. And I gather it doesn't yet support regular text gettys, so it's not even a full replacement for oldschool serial terminals.
It wouldn't even be necessary, except for the loss of network transparency in GNOME and KDE. All you'd need, if the desktops still worked properly over a network, would be a Raspberry Pi at each terminal to run the screen and keyboard, and you'd be 'multihead' as much as any Unix machine ever was, back in the old days, and certainly as much as running this solution.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 8, 2012 1:17 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Lennart's solution can be easily reworked to work with several X servers (even remote ones). It's the beauty of systemd - it's a generic session manager that can be used for just about anything.
Actually, it already should work with xdcmp and gdm. But I haven't checked this personally.
And no, true multihead hasn't been done properly up until now.
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted May 7, 2012 7:33 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1993, PCs Limited 386/16, 6MB RAM, 19 users) Great. I bet they were all running X!?
Poettering: The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature Posted Jun 15, 2012 3:11 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
Sure; 19 X servers in 6MB of RAM. :-)
Note, though, that if -- as some people suggested -- I had been running X terminals, it would indeed have been practical for the users to be running X clients.
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