I would like to set up a second seat for my new 12.2 installation and use a usb display adapter for the second seat. I can see the display adapter with its driver in the hardware information after a probe where it shows as WS Tech USB DVI. I can’t see it in the output of systemctl although the other hardware all seems to be present. Worse still I can’t run loginctl or system-loginctl (which I see is recorded as bug 77096) to add a second seat .
My partner is left with an old laptop running microsoft windows until we can achieve multiseat again - we had ubuntu 10.4 userful but it’s age was beginning to cause problems for us. Opensuse is so much better - at least on our hardware.
Does anyone know of any way round this? Is it possible to bring packages over from Fedora? Systemd seems to make so much sense. If I had more knowledge I might be able to help with the integration but I don’t think I know enough .
Thanks Robin: I am trying to save power on our solar powered installation so the idea is to do away with the laptop and just use an atom which only uses about 60watts
Thanks Arvidjaar: Yes I have seen that which has given me some understanding of systemd and multiseat. But can’t even make it to first base in opensuse without the loginctl code implemented.
Don
“We didn’t enable the systemd support in gdm because it means we need to enable
systemd support in a lot of other packages (like NetworkManager), and we can’tdo that since many of those packages, when built with systemd support, won’twork without systemd at runtime – ie, on systems not booted on systemd.So short version: nothing we can fix until we drop support for sysvinit…”
Here is a little further background info that accounts for why we have the current state of affairs in regards to automatic/hotplug multi-seat support via systemd:
If you don’t necessarily require the hotplug support, you can set up a (relatively static) multi-seat fairly easily actually (<– wholly words that end in ly batman!@!).
I’d recommend:
two seperate xorg config files for each seat … which you will call from the display manager
for the display manager use lightdm … here’s were systemd strikes again: GDM is patched to work with systemd, but KDM currently won’t (KDM + multi-seat configuration) … if systemd wasn’t in the equation (as is the case now for a distro like openSUSE) you’d be able to use whatever DM of your choice… Anyway, getting back to the point, lightdm is really, really easy to config (not that GDM is too hard but lightdm is probably a little more straight forward, IIRC)
I have previously tried to run Fedora17 on my hardware but couldn’t get GDM to work. Found opensuse is excellent with my hardware but then this problem. Now i’ve loaded fc18 beta on a thumb drive and the GDM issues are resolved. Presently attemting to get multi-seat to work by adding a seat attached to my usb display adapter. If I can’t do this then I will probably take your advice and try lightdm and the ‘traditional’ approach to multi-seat with two xorg configs.
okay, best of luck with it! Which displaylink chip does your adapter use? Not sure if they’ve got all of the older gen. supported for the hotplug capability yet (I seem to remember seeing something to that effect). In addition, the newer DL-3xxxx chips most definitely aren’t even supported under Linux yet – though, by the reads of it, your adapter is one of the older gen.
If I can’t do this then I will probably take your advice and try lightdm and the ‘traditional’ approach to multi-seat with two xorg configs.
Yep. Not hard at all (once you know how to do it that is!). You can get fancy to a degree with Tagging and Matchby stuff, but I say Meh to that – keep it simple and bear in mind the implications of the link supplied below.
I guess its all fun … or at least sort of
hehehe, see: xkcd: X11
Ugh, that’s terribly worded. It should read more clearly as:
for the display manager use lightdm … here’s where systemd strikes again … if systemd wasn’t in the equation you’d be able to use the DM of your choice, but for distros that now use systemd (like as the case with openSUSE) your choice of DM will matter.
I am still progressing so will perservere. The board is an atom GA-D525TUD with graphics in the CPU. I’ve got the hardware assigned to both seats now in FC18 but now I think there is a problem with the USB display adapter so need to work through that.
I guess this isn’t really relevant to opensuse until the loginctl is implemented with the other hardware changes need too. For anyone finding this thread you should look at Lex Technica.