Thank you Anton for being objective and incredibly competent. The world needs more people like you. 2014-06-05 15:19 GMT+02:00 Anton Aylward <opensuse@antonaylward.com>:
On 06/05/2014 01:27 AM, Damian Ivanov wrote:
You are full of bullshit. Multiseat was a hack.
Indeed. Aaron is doing what he often does and talking about something using a shift in terminology. Multi-user is not the same as multi-seat.
In this case he starts referring to 'multi-user' versions of UNIX. Yes, I was administering PDP-11s back in the late 70s/early80s running V6 and V7 UNIX ('from the 'love, Dennis' tapes) and BSD2.8 and kernel hacking V6 and V7 and we had up to 40 users on some of the larger config 11/45s before we switched to VAXen.
But what Aaron fails to mention was that these users were running VT100 clones in text only mode on 9600 baud RS-232 links, not the high resolution graphics with keyboard and mouse such as I am currently working at.
It is possible to plug in more graphics cards to my PC, and another (USB) keyboard and another (USB) mouse. Depending on the mobo and the graphics card I might get another two or three potential graphic stations.
But as Damian says, the classic hack with X to make that work was unstable and not good.
This is what MULTI-SEAT is about.
<quote src="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Multiseat"> Linux is inherently multiuser, but PC hardware is usually designed with a single local user in mind. However, it's relatively straightforward to add additional video cards, monitors, and mice to provide access for multiple simultaneous users. </quote>
There are a number of how-to articles out there.
The other shifteroo Aaron indulges in is ascribing to systemd things that it does not do, things that it uses other services to or other programs to do. Systemd is NOT monolithic any more than the BASH shell is monolithic. The original shell of the V7 era was minimalist and the kind of arguments Aaron is throwing against systemd could equally well be thrown at the BASH shell, if he was the UNIX purist he claims. The BASH shell has many things built into it that were done by external programs back in the V7 days and BASH has an amazing number of user interactive features that cause a great deal of "bloat".
I mention this because systemd is not and is not going to subsume X. <quote src="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/multiseat/"> systemd, versions 30 and newer, includes support for keeping track of user sessions and seats. </quote>
Systemd is not implementing multi-seat, it is keeping track of resources are assigned to a seat.
Right now, the X server doesn't handle multi-seat displays properly, so there is a shim in the systemd package to use until the Xorg team complete their work. This is sort of like the old TCPWrappers shim, which eventually went away and was properly integrated.
Nearly a year ago we have http://code.lexarcana.com/posts/simple-multiseat-setup-on-fedora-17.html which starts out <quote> Hardware requirements
Two video cards Two mice Two keyboards
On the test system, we will use an ASRock motherboard with two ATI/AMD RadeonHD video cards: HD6850 and HD2400XT. The 6850 is on the PCIe x16 slot and the 2400 is on the PCIe x4 slot. </quote>
So, is this all reliable? Is it all stable? No, like so much of Linux it is being offered for users to experiment with and give feedback. That has always been the Linux tradition. And THAT is where Aaron comes unstuck. Linux is not Microsoft, despite all his assertions. Systemd is not a finished product any more than a whole host of other things under Linux are, things he isn't complaining about. He rants about systemd and about KDE4 because they represent dramatic changes, more dramatic than the incremental changes that are going on other areas. For example, those of us doing photography can see that Darktable has updates every couple of days, the rate of change probably exceeds that of systemd! But Aaron isn't ranting about that. He may claim that systemd is more fundamental than darktable, but that is nonsense. Those of us doing a lot of photographic work and using darktable are face to face with darktable. For some of us its even part of our revenue stream. Its a lot more apparent than systemd!
If what Aaron is so keen to denigrate and use bad language over is not unique to Linux. Darwin proposed evolutionary change and the debate between evolution and saltation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltation_%28biology%29 persists to this day. But we can see the furore that non-evolutionary (aka patches) change in for example MS-Windows and MS-Office has wraught. The shifts from W/XP to W/Vista to W/7 and now W/8 have all been accompanied by outcries. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178954%28v=office.15%29.aspx But they were nothing compared to the shift from the menu to the "ribbon" and that too garnered a negative reaction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_%28computing%29#Reaction
What differentiates Aaron though is his personal attacks and his use of language.
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