6 / 12 Headed 6 /12 User System

[fanciman]

I would really appreciate your help with this one!

http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html

I thought this was a great idea, and perhaps somebody here would be interested in it, or maybe has done it before. I want to try it, but I would need help badly!

What do you think?

From Thailand:

Would I get a PCIe Mobo (which one?!) with 5 PCI slots?

I would also get a PCIe dual head graphics card and 5 PCI fanless dual head graphics cards. (nvidia, but which ones?!)

PCI http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=PCI+dual+head+video+card

AGP http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=AGP+dual+head+video+card

The PSU for this setup would be v important for stability. Considering what is available here, what would you go with?

afaiu, there is only one keyboard with a USB hub.

What about trying to run it on Windows?

One foreign company does this sort of thing, but what do you think, it is just going to be too expensive to import their stuff?

[Tywais]

This part would make me very nervous shelling out a lot of money to build it. You will really need to know how to rebuild kernels, modules, tweaking, installing new proprietary drivers etc. The hardware is not difficult to buy, lot's of choices in nVidia cards, USB hubs are cheap. If you are really wanting to do it, I would start with only two or three seats max to get a feel for it.

"Problems: Did you catch the phrase "between resets" above? While the system worked very well, it was extremely unstable. In particular, we got a kernel oops fairly often when we logged out. A syslog trace of one such oops is available here. We've tried several things to fix this problem including:

* turning APIC off and on

* reducing the number of heads

* trying the 'nv' and 'vesa' drivers

* using NoInt10

* upgrading to the official X11R6.9 release

* upgrading to the 2.6.15 kernel

* using xdm and fvwm instead of gdm and Gnome

The problem persists. Please let bsmith at linuxtoys dot org know if you have any ideas that might help fix this problem."

[autonomous_unit]

What is the price of one of these video cards?

You should seriously consider the price of the cheapest motherboard w/ integrated graphics, low-end CPU, and reasonable amount of RAM to just make a simple diskless thin client PC per "head": one motherboard, one CPU, one stick of RAM, one cheap case, one keyboard, one mouse, one display.

Use the integrated NIC to put the 6 or 12 machines on a LAN, and run one server machine with disks to serve these thing clients for network-boot and network filesystems. This would be much easier to setup with Linux than trying to juggle all the separate X servers and keeping their input devices separate on one machine.

Six months ago, I could find a 2.4 GHz Athlon64 AND micro-ATX motherboard bundle, w/ integrated graphics, for $99 USD from mainstream web stores in the US. I imagine something similar must be available here, and that speed CPU certainly isn't necessary to meet or beat the performance you'll get from 1/6 or 1/12 of a CPU talking to a slow graphics card on an overloaded PCI bus.