Multiseat

Chris Tyler's Blog

Multiseat Wed, Mar 25. 2009


I haven't written about multiseat for a while.

Bad news first: you can't do (multi-card) multiseat on F10 using open-source drivers, and you won't be able to do it in F11 either. David Airlie's work on the Radeon driver is getting close, but there's still a crash-on-exit last time I checked.

Slightly good news: you can sometimes do multi-card multiseat on Nvidia hardware using the proprietary driver on F10/F11, if the phase of the moon is right. I have it working on a dual-PCIe system, but on another dual-PCIe+dual-PCI system (4 seats), I can only get three of the seats active at once.

Better news: I'm hopeful for the F12 timeframe.

More to follow...

Posted by Chris Tyler in Facebook, Fedora, Fedora Planet, opensource@seneca, Seneca Planet, X Window System (X11) Comments: (6) Trackbacks: (0)

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#1 - Joachim Zobel said:
2009-03-30 15:36 - (Reply)

This is probably
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20816 with 18160 been the most serious one.

#2 - JimK 2009-03-30 17:59 - (Reply)

Chris, thanks for the update on multiseat. With F8 being EOL, I was hoping for an up-to-date solution. Do you know if any of the RHEL 5 clones support multiseat?

#3 - Paringas 2009-04-12 22:06 - (Reply)

Great info on multihead/multiseat for linux.

However, i need to setup my windows xp laptop(intel built-in video) for multihead/multiseat using the likes of xming (http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/).

Hoping it is possible and just as easy as with linux.

#4 - Dmitry 2009-04-29 07:27 - (Reply)

Hi! Chris,
Will may be better organize the multiseat as virtualazation of Desktops on the one X-server?
This way has more perspectives for stability and productivity ... less Processor, less memory, less time of second start the OpenOffice package.
This way need to patch the source of Xorg, and may be - some patches to HAL. This did allready by Userful Corp. (in Alberta) and worked very fine. But his sources is closed and his product "Desktop Multiplier" cost match. Some old patches of Userful X-server, HAL and others packages has the old site of Userful free wiki (may be live).
Good luck, Dmitry

#5 - Dmitry 2009-04-29 07:45 - (Reply)

And solutions of Userful has general advantage - you can use One card with 2 outputs or 4(as Quadro) for 2-4 seats.

#6 - OliTheRed said:
2009-05-11 14:49 - (Reply)

I gave up waiting for this to work again in Fedora and switched to Ubuntu 9.04 (which still uses GDM 2.20).

I was able to reuse my xorg.conf almost exactly, after adding these lines:
====
Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"
Option "AutoEnableDevices" false"
====

All in all it has been a good experience so far and most reassuring to have an uptodate web browser.


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