Ok I was wondering for one of my linux projects using K8000 Linux House Alarm and other thing si want to integrate in the system is that I want to use one server, but have touch screens throughout the house. Each touch screen will be independant of each other (i.e. when you press something on one monitor it won't change it on every other monitor). Is there any hardware out there that will allow me to have lets say five monitors throughout the house all hooked up to one computer. Thanks guys your help is much appreciated.

Hi.

You could go about this in two ways as I see it:

1) One PC, with 5 video cards (you might be able to do this with less than 5 if they're dual head cards, mileage will be variable)

2) Thin clients - one normal pc (as the server) and 5 small, cheap pcs with a very small amount of memory, a network card, a graphics card and a processor (something like a really cheap microATX board). The server runs the applications, and the clients just run an X server for their touchscreens.

Option 1 may not actually be an option, depending on how far the monitors have to be from the main PC - signal loss may become a problem, and you're limited by the number of expansion slots your server has. I'm not sure of the technicalities of having 5 input devices on one machine either.

Option 2 is obviously more expensive, but also more expandable - you can just add extra clients wherever you need them, and you could even do the networking with WiFi to eliminate wiring. The actual implementation is quite simple - X was designed to do just this.

Hope that gives you something to chew over.

Dave

I have no suggestions for this that make sense to even me, but I'd like to know about it if you do get this working.......
best of luck
Smee