Category Archives: Terminal

Windows Multipoint Server 2012 and Plugable USB Zero Clients

Windows Multipoint Server allows you to share a single PC among many users by connecting many USB zero clients (USB terminals). It’s a huge maintenance, power, and cost savings. Microsoft’s newly released 2012 version has a greatly improved software interface for supporting USB clients. But this change meant that, until today, the most popular USB […]

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One Fedora 17 Box up to 16 USB Multiseat Terminals

Fedora 17, as shipped, supports only 7 or 8 plug-and-play USB terminals per machine. The cause is the kernel evdev driver’s limit of 32 input devices. You can see how your 32 evdev slots are currently getting used on a system with the command for i in {0..31..1}; do udevadm info -a -n /dev/input/event$i | […]

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Dconf configuration: GNOME 3 Fallback Mode

The Linux GNOME 3 UI assumes you have a beefy 3D GPU and capable driver, which can cause problems when that isn’t the case. Individual GNOME 3 users can fix this by setting their desktop experience to GNOME 3 “fallback mode” which can avoid the 3D compute burden. Fallback mode is an essential setting for […]

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New Distros and Linux Automatic USB Multiseat Support

OpenSUSE and ArchLinux appear to be making good progress on integrating the latest version of systemd, which is a central element of Linux’s new Automatic USB multiseat support — letting you turn one machine into many with plug and play USB terminals. Since this is all open source, we expect the porting process will happen […]

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DisplayLink USB Devices on Linux Kernel 3.4.0

Linux kernel 3.4.0 is the first to include a new driver for DisplayLink-based USB 2.0 devices, called “udl”. udl is a port of the udlfb driver to Linux’s DRM architecture. David Airlie is doing this work, and the potential is very exciting. Eventually, this architecture will lead to a host of advantages, including GPU-accelerated 3D […]

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Fedora 17’s Secret Turbo Boost Button

Fedora 17’s out-of-the-box plug and play USB multiseat is awesome for sharing one system with many users — but there’s a way to dramatically boost performance and scalability, by changing the Fedora defaults. Background Fedora 17 continues to default to GNOME 3, which assumes the presence of powerful 3D hardware. If that’s not the case […]

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Plugable DC-125 USB Zero Clients Save Money for K-12

One of our K-12 customers was kind enough to send “their story” of deploying Windows Multipoint Server 2011 with Plugable DC-125 Docking Clients, for this 2011-2012 school year. It’s amazing how few people know about the possibilities of turning one computer into many with simple USB terminals. We’re hoping more stories like this will get […]

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