Wednesday, May 6, 2015

X11 Multi-seat running KDE and GNOME

I was archiving data on my old machine and decided to share my old multi-seat configurations (I don't need multi-seat anymore), in case somebody out there is trying to do the same thing.

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
For the sound cards, I just used the GUI setup in KDM and Gnome, respectively, to choose the right pulse audio sound device. I did use the udev to make the names easier to tell them apart.

I ran Arch Linux 64 on that one so the paths may be different if you use a different distro. I apologize in advance for not explaining the details here, many of which were specific to my system back then. I also wish I had time to dig out the document sources for these configs.


/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

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