William L. Maltby wrote:
On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 17:23 +0300, Ioannis Vranos wrote:
OS: CentOS 5.0 x86.
Q1: Is it possible different users to have different
language interfaces
(menus etc) on the same machine under X.Org (GNOME or KDE)?I'm not familiar enough with this to help, but I've done something that may help you find your way on the next question. I suspect the normal LC_* environmental stuff will be needed for the language solution.
Yes, so long as you have all the language packages installed for each language for each GUI (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc).
Console language selection is set through .profile or .login or .bashrc and setting the LANG= environment variable.
GUI language selection is set through the settings applet of that particular GUI.
Q2: Is it possible to have more than one X.Org sessions
running on the
same machine, so as different users to log in at thesame time, and
switch between users X.Org sessions (one using GNOME,other using
XFCE) by using the usual Ctrl-Alt-Fx keys?
<soapbox> It may be redundant, but please be *aware* of the security implications of what you are seeking. "The law of unintended consequences" will certainly come into play if you are truly multi-user. Effects in social interactions, swap usage, system responsiveness can all be expected. You can expect to be asked to do an excessive numbers of restores of backup at a specific point in time (which you won't have) as user A destroys user B's stuff, by intent or accident.
</soapbox>
Hogwash, while yes you will definitely need more resources as far as hard disk, memory and network there is no need to worry about user X overwritting user Y's data. Hell Unix and it's variants had been successfully doing multi-user X sessions for years before even Windows 95 was a glint in Bill's eyes.
Please put user home directories on a RAID10 share as things like Firefox HTML cache cause lots of random IO per-user.
As root, from shell,
startx -- :1 # or 2, 3, ...gets a session started as root. There are more params that can be passed.
For a login process, a basic process is
xdm -server ":1 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X :1" # or 2, 3, ...This gets a basic default layout session going. Other files and parameters may be needed to suit your needs.
Your friend is "man xdm" and *many* others: startx, X, ... follow the path in the "See Also" sections.
Many of the files are scripts. Viewing them can prove instructive.
I've not looked (no need) but I bet there are "primers" out on the web for this sort of stuff too.
Investigate also, this line from /etc/inittab. It may prove more useful to allow automatic start of the extra X instances.
x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemonI would have responded sooner, but I'm such a neophyte at this X stuff that I felt certain someone else would answer with better information.
Look at /etc/X11/xdm/Xaccess (for vanilla xdm)
If running kdm look at /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc for extra security settings.
Basically you'll have your X server broadcast it's services for all X clients to choose to use, you may also need to have your font server allow connections from X clients so the clients can have access to the same fonts as the server.
For multiple user sessions on a single workstation I believe both KDE and Gnome support this (I know KDE does for sure).
-Ross
______________________________________________________________________ This e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail, and any attachments thereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy or printout thereof.