semi-green computing

[Giles Orr]

2009/2/19 Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 05:43:26PM -0500, Matt Price wrote:
>> i'm re-rebuilding our long-out-of-commission media center here at home,
>> and thinking about what components to use.  As my kids get older and
>> start to need a computer, I'd really like to limit the number of boxes
>> we have draining power, so i'm kind of thinking i'd like to have just
>> one box that records, downloads and plays video, stores music, and ALSO
>> has a second seat/x-session on which my kids can surf the internet, type
>> up homework, and also play educational games (for the last one i'm
>> likely to need a windows virtual machine).
>>
>> Because it's doing double duty, i'd like this machine to have a fairly
>> powerful cpu; but because it'll be on a lot of the time, i'd like it to
>> have a half-decent power profile -- especially, i guess, really good
>> sleep states for all the processors, and a bios that supports timed
>> wake-up, so i can setup mythtv to shutdown if it doesn't have any
>> recording to do.  it's been a while since i bought any new hardware, and
>> i just wondered if anyone out there had any recent experience looking
>> for similar attributes.  also if you have any experience running
>> multiple x-sessions -- e.g. can i run one session on the video out of my
>> nvidia card, and a second one on the vga?  i'd love to hear about some
>> helpful stories.  Thanks as always!
>
> I am not sure X officially supports running multi session.  The problem
> is that all mice and keyboards are by default combined into a single
> source of input.  You have to work against that system and split it up
> and run X in raw mode for at least one of the keyboards.

Interestingly, X does at least support multiple pointers and keyboards:

http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/?q=mpx
http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/?q=node/144

What these essentially say is that A) someone developed a
"Multi-Pointer X Server" and B) that it's been merged with Xorg.  So
the support appears to be there - although whether it's made it to the
distros yet is open to question when the merge was May 2008.

A short session with google also turned up this page:

http://www.linuxtoys.org/multiseat/multiseat.html

It references the tyler blog someone else mentioned, but seems to be
more straight-forward.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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