multiseat -- still trying...

[Marcus Schäfer]

Hi,

> In the continuing saga of me trying to get multiseat running so two
> people can use my stupid-fast machine instead of buying & running a
> second box...
> 
> I couldn't get multiseat with two video outputs on a Radeon card, with
> either the proprietary or X.Org driver.  I found an old Voodoo3 card
> and got xorg.conf set up so starting "-layout Seat0" and "-layout
> Seat1" work properly (one at a time!) but if I start one while the
> other is already going, the new server causes the old server to blank
> (but not die).  If I terminate the new server, the old one comes back
> to life.  It doesn't seem to matter whether I start the Radeon server
> or the Voodoo3 server first.
> 
> Anybody have any ideas where to look, or would be willing to check
> configs / log files / whatever information I can collect?  I'm using
> 6.8.2 on linux-2.6.9 (there's something wrong with my 6.9.0 that
> breaks Japanese text input, but I have a 6.9.0 build to test with if
> that will help...)

You can have a look at the blog of Chris Tyler

	http://blog.chris.tylers.info/index.php?/archives/14-Multiseat-X-Under-X11R6.97.0.html

I will implemented support for multiseat into sax. You need
to start the secondary X-Server with opion -isolateDevice <PCI BusID>
and -sharevts -novtswitch.

Currently the most important problem in my opinion is the multiple
keyboard handling. The kbd driver doesn't support multiple devices
so one have to use the evdev driver to be able to specifiy different
input devices. Doing it that way will loose the XKB support on this
device which results in a bit strange keyboard setup
(missing keys, fixed mapping, etc...)

Additionally evdev doesn't support persistent device names which means
if your config provides for example /dev/input/event3 and /dev/input/event4
these devices could be different at each boot. Something like this could be
handled at the layer of hal and udev but currently there is no
naming scheme available. That's the main reason why people are not
convinced completely and why it is not yet available for
configuration in sax :-)

Regards
Marcus
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 Marcus Schäfer (Res. & Dev.)   SUSE LINUX Products GmbH
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