[brlug-general] Multiple concurrent X sessions

[Joe Fruchey]

First off, I've never really messed with virtual terminals, so I don't
know what's supposed to happen. If I switch to anything above vt07, I
get a black screen with a blinking cursor.

Switching to vt06...
Logging in...
startx -- :1 > x.txt
Switching  to vt07
ps -aux shows processes with user#2
Switching to vt06...

OH!

Running X from vt06 switches to vt09. So 1-6 are textmode terminals
and 7-12 are graphical? Whaddya know? When I switched back to vt06, X
wasn't crashed, I was just seeing all the status messages.

Thanks.

Another issue: If I'm using screen 1 and I put in a CD/DVD, it plays
on screen 0. How do I get it to play on the current screen? (FC6 btw)

And Will, FC6 doesn't have built-in user switching.


On 3/4/07, Kevin Kreamer <kevin at kreamer.org> wrote:
> 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
>
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