Multiuser setup and shared hardware?

horo · 2021-12-08 18:25:37

I'm sure this topic may be a bit vague for the mission of these forums, but I've always appreciated the help and experience of this community, so I figured I would ask here first-

All my hardware is getting old and dying. There is some discussion this holiday season of investing in good hardware, and the thought struck me that most of the needs for my family may be met with having a single well built tower, with multiple significantly weaker terminals (tablet, netbook, etc.) being used to interface with the one good computer.

I've never run a setup like this before, and there is simply a great deal of info I don't know, and was hoping the more experienced here could point me to tools, terminology, and resources to help me better understand the proposed solution.

Aside from basic web use and media consuming, the only taxing thing I can think the family would do is play minecraft together. Not sure how this would playout with a single video card.

Also if anyone has recommendations on other forums/communities where this general topic is more frequently discussed, please let me know.

Naik · 2021-12-09 07:16:08

Hello!
I recently thought about the same thing but didn't get real far until now.
But as time goes by and my knowledge grows - as I am actually certifying as system-integration-engineer - I will eventually drop by and leave my findings.

As I can tell you right now, You may have a look into pxe-booting systems, because thats what you may want to do to have your clients make full use of your Hardware. But I don't know what about the graphics card.

naik --greetz

AndrewSmart · 2021-12-09 10:11:51

I've looked into this ~10 years ago. To have an X Server running for each graphics port, with attached input devices mapped to appropriate X servers, a "multi-seat setup". At that time a developer at RedHat had it working for an AMD card, but had less stable progress with NVIDIA so he didn't share his patches for that. So... you might have better luck with AMD graphics. Some developers looked into it as there was interest for saving a lot of money on computer hardware costs at school districts. Probably why RedHat was interested in researching this. I'll dig up some references I have bookmarked. e.g. https://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html

You don't need a tower. I replaced my ~12 year old 550W gluttonous tower this year myself. A mini computer is fine. I bought a ASUS PN50 4500U from CDW recently to replace the tower in the interest of best performance/watt at a reasonable upfront cost. Uses 10W energy at idle (45-60W ish at peak load) and is pretty quiet. The AMD 4300U is a bit cheaper than the 4500U. The ASUS PN51 series didn't seem worth the additional price (better heatsink and CPU). ASUS hardware seems to last much longer that competitors as well. Handles up to 4x 4K displays using 4 ports (HDMI, DisplayPort, USB-C, and configurable port), and I guess you could daisy chain displays together somehow but I don't know much about that. https://www.asus.com/us/Displays-Deskto … i-PC-PN50/

You can also find cheaper MiniPCs but I think the PN50 is the best price right now. Crucial memory is more energy efficient than the HyperX, $73 for 2x8GB DDR4-3200. And the Crucial 1TB MX500 SSD is $100. That's what I bought. I bought a bluetooth Logitech M535 ~$20 and an bluetooth iClever BK03 folding keyboard ~$20. Really nice to not have wires and the aluminum folding keyboard is nice!

You might be able to find maybe a small tower with more ports, but I highly recommend the AMD 4000U series as their IGPU performance per watt and specs puts NVIDIA/Intel to shame.

horo wrote:

with multiple significantly weaker terminals (tablet, netbook, etc.) being used to interface with the one good computer.

x2go works great. I've used an old netbook as an x2go client to a desktop as web browsing would be much quicker. I even used it as a client away from home at the library. Some quirks though... I don't remember what they are or how I worked around them. Like pulse-audio forwarding... I think I had to use an env variable like PULSE_SERVER=192.168.0.205 on the client (and aside from initial config had to initially ftp a key from client->server) and I don't know if PulseAudio would readily support multiple seats, or if the new PipeWire would. I can help with any gotchas if you can't figure out the configuration (I can share my configuration).

horo wrote:

Aside from basic web use and media consuming, the only taxing thing I can think the family would do is play minecraft together. Not sure how this would playout with a single video card.

I don't know off the top of my head. Would probably want to disable vsync.

May be best for you to try out x2go on your existing hardware before making any hardware purchases, and before considering mult-seats at the computer (not sure if multi-seats were what you had in mind). x2go is really top-notch software, I think I donated to them years ago. IIRC video (youtube) in browser worked far better through x2go than locally running the browser on the netbook as my netbook's Intel IGPU was not very good, the desktop had a much better GPU which decoded that video, and x2go would send it to the netbook for display. I don't know the technical details behind this boost in performance but it was interesting to see and gave that old netbook a second life!

I think 3D graphics won't pass through without configuration? Might show as a black box, but I really don't remember what options there are in this and you can ask on the x2go IRC on choices on 3D acceleration. I vaguely recall having to install additional client-side libraries but it has been many years.

x2go is a million times better than VNC as x2go uses far less bandwdith and is more responsive as it compresses/decompresses X Server stuff, like buttons/textboxes/widgets while VNC treats the desktop as a video/image and compresses that on the server and the client decompresses that video/image for rendering. So with VNC it uses more bandwidth, is less responsive, and less fps. But the gotcha with x2go is that sometimes you'll get black boxes for whatever reason (like missing a client library that doesn't know how to render that widget). That's my crude explanation you'll probably find a better explanation on the x2go website somewhere. Also BunsenLabs is a great distro to use with x2go (as newer GNOME isn't compatible and KDE5 takes a long time to load) https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat I think x2go is another huge reason Linux (with the X Server) shines over other OSs. Maybe I've unfairly painted VNC software (there are many varieties) but that's how I view it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFB_protocol#Limitations

After you figure out x2go for your tablets?/netbook, then I suppose you try out a multi-seat X server setup (use that search term "multi-seat X server"). And use the mix of those two technologies to get 4-6 simultaneous users.

I don't know how much effort would be required to do what you envision, or what the limitations may be (e.g. crackly audio). But, it should be technically possible as the underlying technology is there, it's just configuring it and figuring things out that will take time.

Last edited by AndrewSmart (2021-12-09 16:23:22)

horo · 2021-12-10 19:26:23

Thank you both for the write ups. I'll dig deeper into some of the tools and terms mentioned. Mini-pcs are totally on the table, I just haven't dealt with them directly before. Building a backup/storage system along with this is top priority, with a final goal of automating syncing valuable data from multiple devices (phones mostly, old laptops, etc) and either making redundant copies on multiple physical devices or piping it out to some cloud storage option.

#1 2021-12-08 18:25:37

Multiuser setup and shared hardware?

#2 2021-12-09 07:16:08

Re: Multiuser setup and shared hardware?

#3 2021-12-09 10:11:51

Re: Multiuser setup and shared hardware?

#4 2021-12-10 19:26:23

Re: Multiuser setup and shared hardware?

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