I've just discovered the coolest thing ever. I was playing wesnoth and died very early. Funnest 2 hours ever: we had diplomatic deals, truces...Anyway, sparing the details, I decided I wanted to watch it as observer and still play my remaining like 10 units. Instead of going to my other computer (running windows) I realized that it might be possible to type startx and get another session going. Whenever I tried it told me a server was already running on that [location]. I read the man pages to find that startx passes arguments to xinit. Specifically in the xinit man pages it says:So under a diferent account (my "public" account for the ftp server) I did startx -- :1 and boom! Another graphical desktop! And you dont even need another user to do this!

Anyway, I think I know most of what's going on but I have a few questions about this. The sound server will still work if you're logged in as the main (first) user but under another account it gives you the errorIs there a way to use another channel? I know xine says something about the default sound output...And if I do this will I head sounds from both desktops or is there a way to hear it from only one?

Also does it slow down your computer any? It seems to me that the xserver only starts once but you can connect to it over :0 :1 :2 etc and one programm will process calls from all of them?

Oh, another question. Normally F7 is the main desktop anything less 7 is a shell F8 is the startup consol output and anythign greater than that is a little blinking dash. Telling F1 startx will bring the graphical desktop to F9. It seems that you can ctrl z the F1 and the F9 will still run. Are these keys like reserved for this?

And if you have two desktops of an account running(F7 and F8) and log out does it log out for both of them? Or just the F8 one?

wether the sound is or isn't available depends on what sound servers you're using. ideally these days you want to be using alsa underneath it all, with the dmix plugin enabled. this plugin enables as many connections as you want. then you can run multiple high level (waste of space) server like arts in kde or esd in gnome or direct connections to alsa.

does it slow it down? of course it does, you're running twice as much X software.

as for what function key things are on.. they will use the next available one. if you look at /etc/inittab that defines what uses the normal 1-6 consoles, and i assume 8 gets used up after gdm / kdm / xdm has loaded. note that this log output is distro specific, most don't do it.