Multiple Gnome Sessions - One UserID
 

Hi,

I have had multiple gnome 2.6 (jds 3) logins to a machine recently and from time to time notice gconf errors.

I have found workarounds but no solution.

My question is, are multiple logins supported in gnome at all, or where can I find this information. The gnome page is massive, very hard to find this information.

Regards,
Mark

Welcome to the world of software bloat. It effects everything that gets big. Too many features, too much documentation, and the little info you need is hidden away somewhere because they think you'd never care.

Many programs, and I suspect the whole Gnome system, have difficulties dealing with sharing files between running instances. They don't use file locking, I presume. Firefox has this issue. The way I worked around it with Firefox was to create fake home directories and start each instance with the HOME environment variable naming a different one of those (as part of a script that dynamically built that fake home directory on the fly as needed).

What you may be able to do with Gnome is create a few different usernames that share the same user ID number. The kernel would see them all as the same user for purposes of accessing files. But they would have distinct home directories and thus places for each Gnome instance to take up residence. Or maybe that was the workaround you referred to?

Well you see, I use citrix to do multiple connections to a server. Can you / anyone confirm gnome on its own, gives a warning message when logging in more than once.

In the environment I work, I cannot test this. I can only tell that citrix connectinos do not show such a warning.

The workaround I spoke of for gconf errors involved killing gconfd-2 processes.... I just want to find out for definite if multiple logins under one id is supported. Seems like its not recommended..

I know it gives warnings because on another shared system where we use dumb X terminals, logging in from 2 such terminals gives a warning. I don't remember its text. It didn't seem to break things, but I didn't check everything to see for sure.