[GRLUG] What is Multiseat?

[Michael Mol]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Darrin Sculley <darrin at sculley.cc> wrote:
> Yep, I know all about XDCMP.
> The Multiseat technique is using a single PC with multiple sets of video
> cards and usb hub/mice/keyboard sets to reduce hardware costs.  Each seat
> runs a separate X server.  Per-seat cost was under $200 not including
> monitor.  Building few machines meant we could build better machines - quad
> core, lots of memory, solid state disk drives, etc.  We provisioned 32 seats
> with building just 8 PCs, with 4 seats per PC.
> It's described here:
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiseatX
> Darrin

The amusing thing is that while each kvm set runs its own X server,
you don't *need* to run your actual applications on that machine.  You
could have four halfway-decent PCI video cards for $30 each, four USB
keyboard, four USB monitors, and a gigabit NIC providing a path to
where a beefy machine runs all your X clients. (X clients are
applications such as Firefox, OpenOffice, xterm, etc.)  Your X server
box needn't have anything in the way of RAM or CPU bulk.

Heck, my old desktop machine with its backplane architecture could
probably service ten seats that way.

-- 
:wq