[brlug-general] Multiple concurrent X sessions

[Kevin Kreamer]

Joe Fruchey wrote:
> I want to run (surprise, surprise) concurrent X sessions. The first
> thing I tried was just switching to a new terminal and starting X
> again with the :1 switch. That worked, and I could switch back to my
> original session with CTRL-ALT-F7, but when I tried to swap the new
> session back in, X would crash.

Well, that should have worked.  As a matter of fact, I think that any
virtual X server switching on the same monitor/keyboard ultimately uses
this functionality, so you should probably look into why X crashes.
What error message does it give?

> Then I saw a messageboard post about gdmflexiserver. That works quite
> nice, but the new session is on terminal 9 (not a big deal, but why's
> it not configurable?), and it leaves an open console window on the
> original session. If I close the window, the second session remains,
> I'm just curious as to whether there will be any long-term
> consequences.
> 
> Anybody familiar with gdmflexiserver?

Not really.  Does switching back and forth between the sessions also
cause X to crash?

> And if you're wondering why I want this, it's just because I'm trying
> to obliterate Windows from my household, so I installed Fedora on the
> primary family PC. Thing is, we were big users of Windows' Fast User
> Switching. We really only ever used two users though, and it's mainly
> because I like stuff different than most people, and I type Dvorak.
> Based on that info, if you have a better solution, I'd love to hear
> it.

In that case, if you use xdm (or gdm or kdm or ...), you can edit your
Xservers file and add another X server to run all of the time.  Just
copy the :0 line for :1, and adjust accordingly.  You can even pass it
command line arguments to  run a different config file or whatever.  As
I said before though, this really just uses the mechanism above, so you
should fix that.

Kevin