Powerbook Setup

[Eric Kjeldergaard]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:41:18 -0400, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 October 2004 11:43 pm, David Scheidt wrote:
> > On Oct 19, 2004, at 2:20 PM, John Baldwin wrote:
> > > desktop use.)  Oh, and "switch user" from panther.  My wife and I
> > > often share
> > > the same FreeBSD + KDE machine at home and when I'm not using a laptop
> > > we
> > > have to keep logging out to let the other person use the machine.
> > > Having
> > > switch user for KDE would be very, very nice.
> >
> > Not as nice as switching users, but it's possible to run more than one
> > instance of an X server on the machine.
> >
> >   startx -- :1
> >
> > will start X on the next available vt, and call it display :1.  I'm
> > sure xdm can be made to run on it with not much effort, if you feel the
> > need for that.
> >
> > Hitting ctrl-alt-fn is not quite as nice as picking a name out of a
> > menu, and there are some resources wasted.  For two people, on a modern
> > machine, it should be quite fine.
> 
> I'm aware of that (we are using kdm, fwiw), but using multiple displays is a
> hack and not as intuitive as switch user.  It also doesn't scale well.  For N
> people you have to have N kdm instances running.

Perhaps I'm out-of-place in this assumption, but for large N, isn't it
time to get a second machine or perhaps log out?  The quick switching
of graphical desktop isn't done in a particularly comfortable fashion
in any of the desktop environments that I have used (and yes, that
includes Win and OSX).  I understand the desire to keep applications
running and have a second or maybe even third user use the system at
the same time, but I think with kde's state saving and screen, most
things get figured out easily enough.  I certainly wouldn't dislike a
project, either a kde-type project that implemented user switching or
(What I would actually really like) something like screen that would
work for X applications, but I don't know that it's much of a
priority.  You could pretty easily add something to your kmenu that
says switch users, looks for existing kde apps, prompts you, and
covers up for the multiple X server hack.  I've considered doing this
(and may still), but I'm pretty lazy sometimes and got my wife a
separate machine.  If you wanted to do the last suggestion, which
would implement pseudo fast-user switching, I'm sure projects like BSD
and KDE would love to see the results.  A simple combination of
terminal-switching commands, screen lock, and a prompt that looks for
running kde instances (or even X instances for multi-desktop
environment setups) wouldn't be /so/ hard to toss together.

-- 
If I write a signature, my emails will appear more personalised.