Hi,

I like to have different user-profiles on my laptop according to what kind of work I'm doing. E.g. an account for studies, an account for specific dev-projects, one for banking etc. etc.

I normally just log in to an account witch is configured with my fav. window-manager and then just use terminals with an ssh-session and X-forwarding to work on the specific projects with a seperate user.

But is ssh with X-forwarding the best (only) way to do it? Or are there alternatives that doesn't suffer from the overhead provided by encrypting all the traffic (mainly the X-connection)?

Best regards,
kmads

Why not an unencrypted vnc session?

you can use sudo user in terminal or gksu -uuser (usually in gnome) (there is a similar command for KDE), if you just want to start apps with the rights of different users
did you mean that?

No, what I meant was more like getting full access to an account through a terminal with X-forwarding. sudo only allows me to execute a command with the right of another user.
I was thinking more in the lines of 'su', but with a X-connection.

That would be a way to do it

Thanks to both of you!

Best regards,
kmads

You can switch to a tty (e.g. press ctrl+alt+F1), login as the user for your needs, and start a new session for another user by tying in startx -- :1. To get back to the standart session, on my system I press ctrl+alt+F7 (could be ctrl+alt+F5 or ctrl+alt+F6 or something, shouldn't hurt to try all Fx-keys as they only switch the sessions). To switch to the extra session, I press (again, on my system) ctrl+alt+F8.
Most desktops (I think KDE, Gnome and XFCE all do) have some extra function to start such a session without the CLI fuss.
Does this help?

Edit: I just tried the system->log out->switch user menu in Gnome. It opens a new gdm interface where a new user can login, just what I ment above. (Posted before so I wouldn't have to type the text again in case the current session was shut down)

It does! Didn't know about that.

Thanks!

-kmads