Gnome and KDE: Start new Session button?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Sun, 26 Oct 2003, [iso-8859-1] Göran Uddeborg wrote:

>> 1) Not all video hardware and drivers support having multiple X 
>>    server instances running on them.
>
>Are there information anywhere which cards/drivers do support this,
>and which don't?

No.  It is a "if it works for you, wonderful" thing.  When it
doesn't work, it is either due to blatant hardware bugs/quirks,
or lack of support in a given driver - or driver bugs.  Users who
have problems using multiple X servers on a single machine and
have problems with it, are of course encouraged to debug the 
problem and submit patches that fix the issue to bugzilla though.  
I can sometimes offer gdb advice via IRC time depending, using:
	ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris/gdb-xfree86


>Or won't I find out until after I have bought new equipment and
>tested it?

Basically, yes.  It's something that might work by a stroke of 
luck, or might not work at all.  Highly dependant on the specific 
system you've got, the specific video hardware, and it's 
orientation in different slots, wether the driver(s) support this 
or not cleanly, and various other issues.

The reason it's not officially supported is because it is known 
to not work very well, and it's difficult to keep the video 
drivers running on a single head with one X server alone, for 
what is more or less a highly specialized setup.  That shouldn't 
discourage a determined volunteer from contributing bug fixes to 
XFree86.org though for future releases.

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat