Defining seats

[William Jon McCann]

On 1/28/07, Fabian Steiner <lists at fabis-site.net> wrote:
> > On 1/18/07, William Jon McCann <mccann at jhu.edu> wrote:
> > ...
> >> Another question we need to answer is:
> >> "Where and how are Sessions associated with a Seat?"
> >>
> >> At the moment, all locally attached sessions (ie. not XDMCP) are
> >> assigned to Seat1.  So, we haven't really tried to answer this yet.
>
> First of all, I will probably have to ask a rather stupid question: How
> do you define a "session"? Do you mean that a session can be regarded as
> a user who is currently working on one display (among three or four in
> multiseat environments)?

I've tried to formulate a definition of the term here:
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=ConsoleKit.git;a=blob_plain;f=README

So what we are trying to do by defining a Session is to create an
entity that actually corresponds to the common sense idea of a "login
session".  Perhaps surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be such a
thing.  Some notes on this were haphazardly thrown at
http://live.gnome.org/BetterPowerManager.

To your second question, yes.  Every login should create a new session.

> If yes, why can't we simply associate display :0 with seat1 and seat1,
> on the other hand, possesses a usb hub whose device permissions are set
> to the user who owns display :0? Or does this setup involve any
> shortcomings I did not think of?

For the usage you described [1], perhaps the sysadmin can modify the
standard seat configuration to be something like the file attached?

What do you think?

Jon

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2006-September/006172.html
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