One computer, two kids...

I'm sitting here watching my grand niece and nephew fighting over one computer. Well fighting is a little strong for what is happening now, but not always.

But wait, I have another monitor, keyboard, and mouse, why can't I setup a second physical terminal on this computer and generate some peace.

But, Win7 doesn't do that, not even sure the common versions of Ubuntu can do this.

Well, unless you have a second video card, it's kind of moot. If you do, there's almost certainly a way to do it under Linux, but I've never tried and wouldn't know how to tell which X server to use which mouse and keyboard.

Actually I do have a spare video card, and a slot to put it in.

The video card installed is dual monitor capable. Or is just that the drivers are not generally designed to split the resource that way?

Nothing really stopping Windows from doing it. Same with Linux. It just doesn't. Anybody playing games will cause the other session(s) to be slow.

Old product that did what you want with some restrictions.

Don't believe the apps/games in use would cause a notable slowness.

I've seen stuff for this on deal extreme like this one:
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.29039

I've always been intrigued and frightened at the software that must ship with them.

Wow! 512MB EMS memory? How many memory expansion boards must you fit into your PC to get that much?

This is who actually make it or at least make the original if the DX one is a clone


According to the various sites that sell this, it also supports Linux as a host...

The PCI card must be some sort of custom chip with 3 awful graphics controllers integrated with 3 PS/2 interfaces and 3 audio interfaces. That along with the software completes the package.

Ah, well.. this should be reasonably simple to set up in Linux, at least. Just need two "xorg.conf" files, one for each child. Each file should then list the specific video card, keyboard, and mouse assigned to it.

Then just start one copy of X as normal (uses /etc/X11/xorg.conf), and for the other copy specify the second config file as a command line argument.

Cheers

A while ago I found a product that could turn an XP workstation into a Terminal Server, never used it though. It was an HK based company, wonder if that ever went anywhere?

I'll hunt through my emails to see if I can find it.

This was it:

http://www.thinsoftinc.com/index.aspx

I gave it a test drive at the time (2006) and it seemed OK