Talk:Features/Multiseat

Hey Chris, good to see you pick this up again. If you can specify in some more detail what changes are required in ConsoleKit/hal/gdm, that would be great.

Added detail about what's needed (Scope section). --ctyler 02:18, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Feature Wrangler Review

 * 1) Please include a rough draft of the release notes
 * 2) Please include some links to documentation if any is available
 * 3) Please add email address to owner section

Updated these three areas. --ctyler 20:47, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Jon pointed at slide 43 in http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/talks/guadec-new-gdm-turns-you-on.pdf for some (vague) idea on how multiseat configuration in ConsoleKit might look.

See Desktop/Whiteboards/Multiseat for a more concrete writeup.

Single VGA card dualseat?
Hi Chris, wonderful that multiseat is starting to be a standard/common solution. However, from what I have read it seems that all this is about having several VGA cards. Is out there some plan to support single-carded multiseats (dualseat)?

For those who haven't heard about single-card multiseat, here are pages explaining that: --Vojta 16:38, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
 * on Ubuntu with patched Xephyr
 * using XevdevServer to capture input events
 * brief description of my multiseat (with XevdevServer as well)

QA review - 2009-01-01
Perhaps a little early, but the test plan needs some real work here. I'm not sure where at in development this feature is (with a completion percentage of 2% I imagine not far).

As for the alpha requirements of fleshed out scope, I think we're good here.

Update 2009-01-28
There are two ways to do multiseat: to have multiple cards, or use multiple outputs from one card and layered servers (Xephyr approach). The challenge with restoring the multicard functionality lost around F9 is that VGA arbitration/multicard POSTing code that was in the X server needs to go into the kernel, and I need to find someone to champion that patch. (The X server code can't be turned back on due to potential KMS conflicts). I'll discuss this more with ajax when he's back next week.

Without that kernel patch, we're left with just the Xephyr option, which I'll be testing this week.

--ctyler 12:23, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Ubuntu based multiseat computer
At FOSDEM, there's been a 6-users multiseat computer for public usage. I thought I'd share the link to the Belgian provider of these -- Red

http://www.multiseatcomputer.be/

= stuff about multiseat X that i found - MArafa =

automseat
this guy while working here  (click Research) released this |automseat script. the description of it makes multiseat sound very easy

userful
| the open source version of | userful's commercial product

Is there a networking component to this?

 * If people are playing networked games on the same machine, is this going to mostly just work?
 * Is there some way to associate a 127 address with each session in cases where the clients need to be at different ip addesses (to avoid port conflicts)?

-- Bruno

= GDM and ConsoleKit status 2009-10-26 =

GDM and ConsoleKit both have nowadays specific branches that support multiseat but the changes did not manage to get into the main brances for release, thus missing the F12 timeframe. Other missing bits and parts are still related to other infrastructure, like assigning devices to specific users. Some udev related changes are needed and then also changes to other components, such as X and pulseaudio, to understand the extra bits of information that udev provides for them.

-- jhonkela

= Late 2011 status =

Is there any progress in Fedora Multiseat? I have been using Red Hat Linux/Fedora with multiseat since at least 2004 (with custom-built XFree86 at that time), and now it mostly works, if configured by hand. The required components are:


 * Use xdm. Stop fooling yourself that gdm developers will actually do something for multiseat users. They will not (see bug #451562).
 * Configure Xorg by hand. Nowadays we have VGA-arbiter, so -isolateDevice is probably the only Xorg command-line argument needed. In xorg.conf, keyboards, mice, and video cards have to be manually configured to form seats.
 * Use system-wide pulseaudio to split multiple audio output jacks into virtual soundcards.
 * Do not expect total isolation between the seats, unless various *kits are fixed (e.g. auto-mounting CD/DVDs - with which seat's permissions?, etc.).
 * Use a F14 kernel (see bug #719260).

-- Yenya