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So since I been away from the homefront, many of the computers at home have had some bad video cards going out, motherboards popping, an an occasional mishap with kids being kids, spilling nasty soda onto keyboards.
The problem though, I'm trying to save money to get the family moved to our new location. Saving money is a must! So since energy costs are going to insane prices, I had to come up with a way to get the boys a system, but with only 1 computer.
Userful, helped me out tremendously for the first weeks. It turns one basic PC, into multiple workstations. If you have a few keyboards, monitors, and mice laying around, the free 2 user license can be downloaded from the Ubuntu repositories, though I always recommend downloading the latest releases from a vendors site,just in case improvements have come along the way.
Before you jump on the Userful band wagon, let me let you know, installing it is cake, but uninstalling it..well from directions given, it seems quite troublesome on the Linux platform, even though it was initially designed for the platform, which I assume from how much it's sold and worded by infomercials posted from their website.
Before you begin, make sure to address adding users to the workstation, or add it to your domain if your a business. I made that mistake and lost control of adding applications after initially not setting permissions on my user name. EPIC FAIL! It essentially gave no write permissions to the users, so after installing it, I had to add users to the new "userful" group as administrators in order to obtain flexible control to install applications.
There isn't OpenGL support at this time, but is being addressed. My assumptions is that running two forms of the xgl driver on which is considered a single station can't run multiple instances, or doesn't know how to behave and where to load. I looked in bugs list, this is being addressed and hopefully in future releases.If you don't have interest in 3d games, or and 3d rendering software, this should do you justice.
If you have another soundcard laying around, I'd install it. Userful can associate 1 sound device per station. If you have the funds, a USB keyboard with on board sound will address the matter of also another pair of speakers. Userful's page sells a 4 user package which can be purcheased, but does not include 4 user license Logitec USB headset would address this for a cheaper price, and finding these keyboards seem to be hard with identical specs, though I know there out there.Just don't know the magic words to find them on Google. |
