Making A Easy-To-Setup $50 Linux Multi-Seat Computer

[curaga]

For instance, you can hot desk. You can not do that with an ordinary thin client. Have you studied the SunRay or are you guessing?

I have, in fact. Doesn't hot-desk mean you can continue your session on another thin client? Yes, most normal thin clients can do that. VNC can do that, as do many other such protocols. Sun merely had very nice integration with their smart cards and such, using solutions from other vendors you'd have to set some things up yourself.

Very different. Sunray is similar to this USB client (which do have a cpu, even a keyboard has a cpu). The Sunray does not run an OS, it has a BIOS (actually, something called Firmware). But no OS. Nothing to patch. Nothing that can be hacked. No virus is possible. No harddrive, no nothing.

What do you think is netbooted from the server then? What handles networking, what is their VNC client running on?

If its OS were static in the BIOS chip, it would only make it less secure - harder to update when new vulnerabilites are discovered.

[kobblestown]

A rather flexible solution to multiseat is remote virtualization (i.e. running the virtual machines at some remote server rather than locally on a desktop machine). Of course, you will need to access the virtual machines remotely, e.g. over RDP for Windows guests (or for accessing VirtualBox console regardless of the guest OS) or VNC (KVM console, Unix guests). I'm very excited about SPICE and will be trying to move to SPICE-enabled virtualized desktop at home to see how it fares.

Then, of course, one needs a computer to access the remote virtual machine. I think RaspberryPi should be able to handle an RDP/VNC/SPICE client while being cheaper at the same time! I'd like to buy one (or three) of those once the 350000 preordered devices have been shipped

Such scenario is not strictly speaking multiseat but achieves pretty much the same effect, if you can find cheap client machines like RaspberryPi. And you get 'hot desk' (is this a real idiom?) along the way.

I think virtualization can be used even with a traditional multi-GPU mutliseat configuration. It's just that the only application that will be run on each seat is an RDP/VNC/SPICE client which connects to the virtual machine for the particular user possibly running on the same physical machine. That's pretty nice if you want to implement multiseat for, e.g. Windows or some other OS that cannot do multiseat.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Looks like project will not be succeed. Idea of ​​lack of demand comes to mind first, but there is other reasons:
1. International shipping only for five units, no less.
2. International shipping only of DC-125 unit, that doesn't support high screen resolution.

Few thousands people maybe order UD-160, even with payment for shipping, but it's impossible. It's not enough to reach the goal anyway, so lack of demand is main reason of this fail. Sad to see that.

[bastafidli]

But the biggest problem is per-seat sound and usb ports.

Per seat USB is actually fairly easy since Pulse Audio. I use the setup described here

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiseatX
http://disjunkt.com/jd/2010/en/multi...ng-sounds-109/

with system wide pulse audio. Works just fine with 3 seat configuration based on 1NVidia video card with sound over HDMI and 2 NVidia cards paired with 2 SoundBlaster cards.

I believe the product described in this article defeats the true purpose of multiseat. You can have multiseat for under $20 by adding addition GFx cards that supports also sound over HDMI. I use wireless mouse/keybard combos a 1 USB hub shared by 2 seats. The 3rd seat gets USB ports directly on the computer. Also since many LCDs these days come with USB hubs they eliminate neat for product described in this article.