video hardware advice and dual logins

[Kwan Lowe]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 6:18 PM, Chris Kottaridis
<chriskot at quietwind.net> wrote:
> I am putting together a machine and plan to run Fedora Core 12 on it.
>
> I want to run with 2 monitors and am wondering if there is some
> preferred video card I should buy that can provide two monitors.
>
> I will only be doing web browsing and text editing and such. I don't
> need anything fancy. I won't be runinng any games on this or watching
> DVD's.
>
> Is there any list of video cards that Fedora Core 12 is known to work
> with in a dual monitor setup ?
>
> What I want to do is have two distinct logins. So, I can log in as one
> user on one monitor and log in as a different user on the other monitor
> but just have the one keyboard. Basically, gdm running on both monitors
> and hot switch the keyboard from one to the other.
>
> Everything I have seen talks about setting up things to have both
> monitors used by one user and essentially get one bigger monitor. So,
> any pointers to how to set up dual monitors with separate users logging
> in would be great.
>
> Right now I login as one user and then start a VNC session as another
> user and operate like that. I'd rather not do that if possible.

I haven't tried this, so please take with a grain of salt:

You can run two distinct X servers on each monitor.  In fact, it's
quite simple if you're running two keyboards and two monitors. The
issue is that you're running a single keyboard...

To get around this you can setup your X servers to run on the
different screens. Next, set one to not fail if it doesn't detect a
keyboard or mouse.

Next, run the synergy keyboard sharing utility on both instances. The
first instance will be a server. The second will be the client.

Theoretically it should allow you to use a single keyboard/mouse with
both heads.