It was a 7-year-old Dell PowerEdge server SC-1430 running dual Xeon (8 virtual cores), excellent for compiling, number crunching (machine learning), and video processing (Cinelerra), and on top of all that, it served as a file/media server running RAID 5 over RAID 0.
It was a power beast, in another sense, too, though -- it consumed a lot of power.
Since it was consuming power anyway, I decided to get rid of other computers and maximize its use, by setting up a multi-seat X11, so two users could use it at the same time. There were two sets of everything: two screens (on two NVIDIA cards), two keyboards, two mouses, and two USB sound cards. It worked just like two independent machines. In fact, one seat ran KDE and the other one ran GNOME. The login screen ran KDM, with two login boxes (default to the regular user login name) on respective screens and matching wallpapers. We were even able to play "networked" game against each other.
(Actually I had three sets of xorg.conf to support multi-seat, left-side dual screen, and right-side dual screen, and I used symlinks to dynamically switch to a different configuration. However, there's more info on dual screen setups out there so I skipped those here.)
For me, there were a few files to configure. These are the ones relevant to most people:
- /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc
- /etc/kde/kdm/backgroundrc.seat0
- /etc/kde/kdm/backgroundrc.seat1
- /etc/udev/rules.d/60-dell-keyboards.rules (omit here; see my other post on udev for that)
- /etc/udev/rules.d/90-creative-xmod.rules
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
/usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc
/usr/share/config/kdm/backgroundrc.seat0
/usr/share/config/kdm/backgroundrc.seat1
/etc/udev/rules.d/90-creative-xmod.rules