[Discuss] can one safely login multiple times to the same user on a modern Linux desktop?

[Edward Ned Harvey (blu)]

> From: Bill Bogstad [mailto:bogstad at pobox.com]
> Sent: Monday, September 03, 2012 8:27 PM
> 
> On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu)
> <blu at nedharvey.com> wrote:
> > From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> > bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Bill Bogstad
> 
> Why don't you just create one session and reuse it?  For example, create a
> VNC session, and just keep connecting to the same VNC session from all your
> different clients?
> 
> As far as I know neither VNC nor any of the Linux "standard" remote desktop
> tools support sound or video streams.   I'm also trying to support a model
> where I (or anyone else using my setup) can move from workstation to
> workstation and not have to worry remember to log off of the previous one
> while still having a "complete" experience.  Am I wrong about this?

Ahh, sound & video.  I can see that posing a problem.  The suspend/resume session should not be a problem for things like VNC.  In fact, you could have a whole bunch of clients all watching the same VNC session simultaneously, or you could click the checkbox, "when a second session connects, terminate the first one."  Which just limits the number of simultaneous different clients to 1.

VNC might not do well at supporting audio or video, but I'm quite sure NX does.  And Exceed onDemand.  And GoGlobal.  (All commercial products.)  And Citrix ... whatever their product is called.

The world of resumable X sessions might have improved in recent years.  You might search around for that kind of product.

Also, now that I think of it, the only reason something like VNC wouldn't support video would be if the video is going through the video card, in which case, probably nothing can possibly support it.  But even if VNC does support the video, it's likely to be very high bandwidth, and it might perform poorly.  Products like NX (I'm naming NX specifically) have more intelligent algorithms that send rough images first, and sharpen as bandwidth permits, so if you don't have enough bandwidth, you'll just get a grainy result instead of a broken result.