Date: Thu, 22 Oct 1998 09:54:39 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@solaria.sol.net> To: nick.himba@jrc.it Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: multiple consoles in FreeBSD Message-ID: <199810221454.JAA26061@aurora.sol.net>
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The most obvious suggestion is to use terminals, just like in the old days. :-) To do it with X is different. If you really want to connect multiple keyboards/mice/monitors to one PC, you'll have a lot of fun ahead. The multiple monitors may be the easiest thing, since PCI allows more than one video card, and last I looked, the XFree86 server can be "set" to use a particular card. There may be some interaction with the system's primary console (allocation of a vty), but I suspect that it might not be too hard to run multiple Xservers... then again, maybe the X-syscons interaction is more complex, in which case you'd need to be able to have multiple instances of sc and I don't know if it was written to allow that. The mouse isn't a problem, hook up serial mice and problem solved. The X server is responsible for talking to the mouse anyways. The keyboard is the remaining problem and the real Fun Part(tm). You will essentially need to build a keyboard driver, and either write it into the Xserver to use a generic USB driver, or write a USB keyboard driver into the kernel and offer some sort of compatible interface to XFree86. This would work best, I think, with additional instances of sc, one bound to each keyboard, and if one did that, then things begin to look very much like one might expect a single-console system to look like. This sort of thing is actually much easier on a Sun, where there are far fewer complications because the console stuff is compartmentalized a bit better. (No offense to sos, sc is a beautiful bit of work, but Sun doesn't tie the keyboard and the display together until the very highest level. It is pretty easy to add a second keyboard/mouse to a Sun, particularly if you only want to use it in X). A much more traditional approach might be to build Xterminals and then use XDM. This will be slightly more pricey than buying multiple video cards and stuff to try to make one PC drive multiple kb/mon/mice, but more flexible in the long term. The Xterminal I do my day-to-day work on ia a 486/133 with 32MB RAM and a Diamond video card of some sort. It has a network card, mouse, floppy, and boots from floppy and NFS mounts and runs a minimal FreeBSD that runs X. (Code available). For the space conscious, who might not want a minitower PC, look at ASUS's "Booksize PC" - or at a laptop for that matter. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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