[ale] Alternatives to Userful?

[brian at polibyte.com (Brian Pitts)]

Neal Rhodes wrote:
> Greetings.
> 
> I'm running FC10 on the office servers and Ubuntu 8.04 on an HP AMD-64
> notebook.    The notebook's video card can do independent displays
> internal/external.   I was really hoping to be able to use this on the
> road with a 2nd monitor and 2nd USB keyboard/mouse for a 2nd developer.
> 
> Userful (userful.com) sounds like it would be just the thing.    However
> they don't support AMD-64 bit Ubuntu anything and have no plans to do
> so.   Any other thoughts on how to get 2 independent users on a linux
> notebook?

I looked into this recently for someone at Free IT Athens.

Here is a wikipedia article that provides a historical overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration

This sort of configuration is not well supported; here is an
article about some of the improvements it needs:

http://vignatti.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/multiseat-roadmap/

In addition to having limitations, it's difficult to set up. However,
people have put work into a program called MDM that eliminates a lot of
the complexity:

http://vignatti.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/multiseat-roadmap/

Even better, they have a modified version of Ubuntu available for
download that includes MDM:

http://wiki.c3sl.ufpr.br/multiseat/index.php/Live-CD

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts