Two physical terminals on one box possible?
 

Not sure if this belongs in the networking forum or the hardware forum... but I'm not going to be the first one to multi-post so...

If a person has two complete systems, but one system has a proken processor, is it possible to connect the extra screen to an unused monitor port (i.e. the integrated on-board one), and a serial, USB or PS/2 keyboard (given that there are unused slots) and have two terminals fully supported? How is this done? Can X run on both, etc. if there is enough RAM to support that sort of function?

Thanks

You can of course connect two monitors at the same time and run dual-head. I'm not sure why you would want to connect two keyboards and two mice though as you're only running one OS on the PC.

I have found a little more information on dual-heading, as this turns out to be called. The main reason I want to give two users the ability to use the same computer at once (email, web, word processing, etc) is so I can task one computer out to be the web-interface computer, and repair the higher-performance one and make it the serious crunching machine. The vast majority of your processing cycles are wasted anyway, and there is no noticable loss in speed unless both users are actively starting apps at the same time, or running something highly compute-intensive, such as a game or performing a large compile.

Instead of shelling out a few hundred bucks to buy another computer or two, I can just hook spare peripherals to the same box and have them operate different virtual console sessions simultaneously.

As I mentioned, I ran across a little information on doing this earlier, but it is very difficult to find. As I learn more, I'll post it here, or probably just wind up writing a full-on tutorial on how to multi-head in this way and post it somewhere. For networking a single house, this makes a lot of sense anyway, and could be a practical solution for a lot of small offices as well.

As far as I can find, the 2.6 kernel already supports this (and in fact, Unix always did from the start -- it was the whole point of the Xterminal concept, actually -- but the actual input of multiple keyboards and mice being hooked up to the same physical box but dedicated to specific consoles always required a workaround until now). The most complicated part is setting up and initializing the second monitor, and initializing X to start a second, independent session in another console.

At the moment, nearly every Linux box has several virtual consoles available which roughly correspond to the function keys. X uses console 7 by default. If you are using X right now, press ALT+CTRL+F1 to switch to console 1 now to see what I'm talking about. To get back to X, ALT+CTRL+F7 will bring you back into your current X session. The trick is to intialize and setup another independent X server session to run alongside this one on console 6, for instance. Then segregate the input devices you want to use for that console. From what I've read, the most straight-forward configurations involve using a set of PS/2 devices and a set of USB devices, as it is very difficult to get which one is which mixed up.

Then you boot from the primary display and input devices, and then switch to another console in the secondary display and input devices and start the extra X server. If you had limitless graphics cards, RAM, and USB hubs and peripherals, you could effectively operate your home computer the way the old multi-terminal systems were operated, with a terminal in each room of your house all connected to one, single computer in place of buying a fully-functional new computer that will sit idle 99% of its processing time performing no work.

This does not seem unreasonable for common web, multi-media and information manipulation tasks (i.e. word processing, making presentations, listening to music, etc.). Of course, to play serious games, use a serious 3D CAD program, do almost anything useful with the GIMP, etc. this won't work out so hot.