Multihead PC



More than once I’ve wished for a second (or third) set of keyboard/mouse/video for my main desktop. Linux is a true multiuser operating system which means that it’s capable of hosting multiple graphical logins at the same time. For MOST things, a single, modern CPU is more than adequate to deal with this (memory is usually the limitation, but 1 GB ought to be enough.) So, I think all of this was prompted by a blurb about hubster which looks like it’s just a VGA-usb adapter. The company that makes it though bill it as a thin client of sorts. So, they’re essentially thinking thin-client over usb as opposed to thin-client over ethernet…


Really, it’s just a clever use of the terminology – it wouldn’t HAVE to be over usb – it could be through multiple pci video cards and (these days) multiple usb mice/keyboards.

Yes, that may be yet one more thing that I do with my desktop – branch out to multiple simultaneous logins.

I did come across a couple interesting articles on the setup of multihead systems which hopefully I can find again for reference… LinuxGazette.net on building a 6headed system and this GOOD howto on multiseat X under X11R6.9/7.0 (written December 2005). It looks fairly straightforward.

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