On Mon, Nov 11, 2024 at 03:26:26 +0000, brian mckee wrote: > I have a work station. > If I put debian on it. > I want it to have 5 monsters. > 5 key boards. > 5 mice. > So 5 people can long in. At same time. > What Verizon should I download
Autocorrect is a monitor. I mean, monster. What you're describing doesn't sound like it's possible using a single computer. (If it's possible, then I have no idea how you would do it.) Usually, if a machine has multiple monitors connected to it, those monitors are arranged to form a single large virtual display that encompasses all of them -- and the most I've ever seen in such an arrangement is four. If you hadn't said "mice", I would have suggested that perhaps you're looking for terminals. Five or more ASCII terminals connected to a single host was a popular model from the 1970s to 1990s. However, with mice in the picture, what you're looking for more closely matches the "X station" model that was used in the 1980s and 1990s, where a single host computer would support X sessions running on multiple remote "X station" devices which did not have their own full operating systems installed. They would all communicate over an ethernet network. The host computer would run a display manager running the X Display Manager Control Protocol (XDMCP), and the stations would connect to that and login to the host. I don't know where one would acquire X stations in 2024. They're no longer in fashion. However, you could still approximate that model by buying 4 cheap computers and installing a minimal Debian + X server on them. On the main computer, run a display manager in XDMCP mode, and tell the other computers to connect to that. You wouldn't get the full "benefit" of X stations, which is that you don't need to maintain security patches on 5 separate instances of Debian. But this would come pretty close to what you're asking for. Another possibility would be to install a slightly fuller Debian on each of the cheap computers, and use VNC sessions running on the host computer. Each of the cheap ones would need an X server and a VNC client; the host computer would need a VNC server, and you'd run four instances of it, one for each client. The main advantage of VNC over XDMCP would be that there are VNC clients available for Microsoft Windows and so on. Your client computers wouldn't need to be running Linux; they could run anything you want.
