What does 'Userful' do? [LWN.net]

What does 'Userful' do?

Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:32 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment

Looking at the website it appears that 'Userful Multiseat' is proprietary software charging a per-seat licence. Since easy multi-head support will soon be part of Fedora and other distributions, what extra feature does this proprietary software offer?

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What does 'Userful' do?

Posted Aug 23, 2011 12:28 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, it sounds like one of the things that it offers is the backing of a company that is trying to solve some of the problems listed in the article and the comments.

Before we rush to pull Userful's oxygen, perhaps we should ask ourselves what the consequences would be. It sounds like Microsoft is investing a lot of money to ensure they do not lose these markets. If we think that Linux based solutions would be a positive step forward, we need to understand how to make that work.

I agree, it would be great to see all the software as free software. If efforts to install Linux as a significant fraction of emerging market deployments are successful, I am sure fully free alternatives will emerge.

What does 'Userful' do?

Posted Aug 23, 2011 18:38 UTC (Tue) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

"Before we rush to pull Userful's oxygen, perhaps we should ask ourselves what the consequences would be."

I doubt per-seat licensing is all their oxygen. Usually there is also a fixed project price and consulting fees on extra work. Most likely the per-seat cost is even included in the fixed project price when Userful is pitching their deployment project to countries.

Even after losing the per-seat revenue userful would still sell projects and consulting as the most experienced wide scale deployment provider.

What does 'Userful' do?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 11:58 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

Don't get me wrong, perhaps my comment was a bit sour, but I meant to ask factually: what does it do that's better than the free alternative?

What does 'Userful' do?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 14:11 UTC (Wed) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link] (1 responses)

As Griffin explained it, Userful is mostly what you would probably call a system integrator. That is, they aren't maintaining their own distro; the software they deploy seems to vary depending on the contract (hence Educational Linux instead of Userful Linux in the case of Brazil). So I don't know who actually wrote the multi-seat X component they deploy, but the impression I got was that the company is not primarily software engineers.

As it stands now, Multi-seat X can be done by nesting multiple X servers (eg, with Xephyr) -- which is slow -- or independently configuring an Xorg server for each front-end (which is no doubt painful, and probably not easy to do on the USB terminals). So my guess would be that whatever solution they have rolled into Userful Linux simplifies the configuration of maintaining 10 Xorg servers on one host machine, in a location without an Xorg hacker on staff. It may even have required special work for the hardware support; but that's speculation.

In any event, my point was that they aren't pushing their X solution as a product and may even be licensing it from someone else, because it can't be done effectively in free Xorg. If that changes and a future X server can natively handle multiseat, I would expect them to switch over to that -- no matter what the situation is, not maintaining your own X server software saves considerable time and resources.

Nate

What does 'Userful' do?

Posted Sep 1, 2011 5:36 UTC (Thu) by Burgundavia (guest, #25172) [Link]

Userful actually wrote the Multiseat X they deploy, for what its worth.

Full Disclosure: I used to work for Userful

What does 'Userful' do?

Posted Aug 23, 2011 14:02 UTC (Tue) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

Does helping schools to deploy Linux now rather than "soon" count as an extra feature?

Good luck to Userful, it's great that free alternatives exist, but if noone is willing to promote and support those alternatives then I'd rather see Userful get the sales than MS get them