I wanted to know and do three things things basically

• First of all, what are the tty[1:6] monitors called? The ones where you press Ctrl + Alt + F[1:6] to reach?
• I want to use two window managers, each in a separate tty thingie and I want to understand why it's done the way it is.
• I want to try using two windows managers on two monitors at the same time (just to see whether it's possible and how it's done)

I know a little about number two, but the problem is I don't know why it works (on second thought, I did use it such a long time ago that I can't really recall how it was verbatim):
When you did something like this, some (what I still find random) screen appears, and there you can type something like gnome-start, xfce4.. etc. and that window manager appears in that tty.

As for part three I'm baffled. Could anyone give a helping hand to a newbie?

They are called alternate consoles.



Set up two users to use different window managers and then log in to each alternate console as a different user.


Set up two users to use different window managers and then log in to each monitor as a different user.

-------------------
Steve Stites

Finally someone tells me what they're called. Are you sure though, because Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about alternate consoles and Google doesn't find a hell'uva lot either.

Yes of course it's possible to simply log in as a different user each with a different window manager. It would be great if someone could explain what the pros and cons of running another manager using xinit; whether it's faster/slower, too complicated etc, and how to do it properly with xinit. Like you can see by my original post I probably didn't write it correctly, and I also don't know how to assign the other monitor to a specific "alternate console" via xinit.

Also, I don't know how to log into each monitor using a different user could anyone elaborate?

I just tried this on Fedora 10, and it worked there so I could have a KDE session on tty7 and a GNOME session on tty8 for me (i.e., a single user).

First, I looked at /etc/X11/Xclients to see how the startx command decided which type of session to start.

Seeing that, on Fedora, it read /etc/sysconfig/desktop to set the $SESSION variable, I changed that file to look like this (well, sort of - this was my default):Then I edited the file to comment out the DESKTOP=KDE and uncomment the GNOME one.

Finally, I did a startx -- :1 to start a new X session on tty8.

Voila! One KDE session, one GNOME session with a <ctrl>-<alt>-<F[78]> to switch between them.

(By the way, KDE has a "Switch User" menu item that did this in KDE 3.5, but it does not work (on Fedora) under KDE 4.1.)

Since I find it sometimes useful to have both types of sessions open, I think I'll write a script to "automate" the editing of the desktop file. (Probably just a simple sudo mv from a KDE and GNOME version.)

Note: A simple startx -- :1 opens (again, on Fedora 10) a simple xterm window with no decorations, etc. Similar, I believe, to what the OP was discussing.

<edit>
If you have two monitors, the startx syntax would be, I believe, startx -- 1:0 for the first screen on the second monitor. It might be -- 1:1 to get tty8 to connect to the second screen. Since I have only one monitor, I can't check the syntax for different tty's on different screens. What I described before this edit was different screens on the same monitor.
</edit>

Thanks!
I don't have a second screen atm, but the first part worked perfectly.
Do you know of any way to choose in what virtual shell (tty[7:12]) the new X environment starts in?

The :x specified the tty. On most system, the tty is tty$((x+7)).

By the way, I discovered that there's a utility script (switchdesktop) on Fedora that changes the .XClients* script(s) which determine the default session started on a per-user basis.

You might also find the sample xinirc script towards the end of the man xinit interesting since it discusses creating a simple xterm only session.