Comment by z3t4

18 hours ago

I used multi seat in Linux with SystemD, i just threw in some old grapchics cards and sound cards in my gaming PC so that the children could play on separate monitors while I worked. Multi seat is very cool. When upgrading to a new gaming PC it was much cheaper to build 4 separate machines because cpu's and motherboards with enough pcie lanes are very expensive. GPU's still run at decent performance with half the pcie lanes available, so if you already got a gaming PC with many slots and dont need top performance it could still be worth it to get two more cheap gpus and use multi seats - for those building a mini lan gaming room at home.

One annoying thing is that linux cant run many different GPU drivers at the same time, so you have to make sure the cards work with the same driver.

Properitary 3rd party multi seat also exist for Windows, but Linux has built in support and its free.

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z3t4

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seg_lol  16 hours ago

This is awesome!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration

I am super curious about your setup. I played with MS years ago, but I lost the need. It is a super cool tech that I'd love to see its efficiencies embraced in some way.

  • z3t4  9 hours ago

    Install an old GPU, Connected a monitor to the extra GPU, connect mouse and keyboard, Use the loginctl command to list available devices/usb ports and attach them to a seat.

    I suggest using Arch linux although loginctl should be available in all distributions using SystemD now.

    If you don't have enough USB ports you can use a USB hub, some monitors comes with USB hub. And some with built in sound, or you can use wireless headset.

    My main issue was that driver support was dropped for my oldest GPU card. So one day when I upgraded the OS it just stopped working. So to be on the safe side get another GPU like the one you already have.

    • ngcc_hk  4 hours ago

      Sorry being IT guy I wondered about the logic. I understand the need to align. But if one fail all fail and children like customers … not the patient kind? Or you have two system within each … then across the …. Sorry cannot stop my mind spinning.

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