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« on: April 01, 2013, 11:43:21 pm »
I used a setup you could call a multihead for quite a while at my old address, I agree with l3mce that for the effort and with current limitations that adding another MD is a better solution. What seems at first to be a simple configuration of xorg turns out to be much much more involved when you take into account the other elements mentioned in this thread such as AVwizard, where orbiter is drawn etc. Remember also that unless you are able to continually support your custom configuration that the lmce community can not and should not assist you with issues that may come up. Not being one to discourage experimenting, as I have several way-less-than supported MDs I will offer these suggestions.
*nVidia TwinView: It is easy to add duplicate display outputs on a second GPU 'after' avwizard has configured your primary display. The elements to remember here is that the primary display must be on during any reboots or avwizard and possibly myth/xine will want to change your settings. I used this for my bedroom/office with primary display (1080p) going to a desktop monitor via DVI-DVI cable and secondary (mirrored) display going to a TV at the foot of my bed via DVI-HDMI. There was no smart home control of the second display because it was effectively hidden from LMCE, I just had to power off the desktop monitor and manually change the TV to that input.
*Current supported setup: I would need to get out my kill-a-watt to compare energy usage but I am willing to bet I could add 2-3 Acer Revos before I matched the power consumption of a similarly featured PC with a 450-650w PSU. With separate physical hardware things such as bluetooth detection, standby, independent reboots, etc are all possible. Things connected to either PC are assigned properly as are things such as lights and climate, under a combined PC I would not easily be able to define which lights that "showtime" should dim when a movie is placed into a single DVD rom.
*Possible middle ground: I have not used it under lmce but I know of several users who have had success with MD via virtualbox. For this I recommend using the latest Virtualbox from Oracle and not the Virtualbox-OSE as it supports things such as USB 2.0 and PXE booting which could make or break this type of setup. You would still have issues with things like bluetooth detection but seperate configurable devices could be combined into a central chassis. You would need to 'in my opinion' build a PC with 2.5 X the resources as a standard MD as the host OS will most likely have an xorg and other resource consuming installtions. While the GPUs are able to be split things such as drives, network cards, sound cards etc would need to be physically duplicated.
Host Board
4core cpu
4gb ram
onboard video using side-memory
dual output GPU via PCIe
dual gig network card via PCIe
add on soundcard via PCIe or PCI
one DVD Rom (or blueray, though not sure if that is supported yet)
Host runs as a file server with its HDD(s) using lmce file structure - onboard network, video, one usb port reserved for file uploads to host
vboxMD using 1.5gig ram and 1 cpu core - assigned 1 of the add on ethernet ports, half the usb ports, config for NAT addressing using DHCP and PXE booting (output cables to a less used area)
vboxMD using 2.0gig ram and 2 cpu cores - assigned all of the above but add disk drive for easy access (the entire box for the above will go where this output is intended to go)
Full screen the vboxMD and locate near the display for a high use AV room. The experience will be that of a local machine controlling that display/receiver/etc as disks inserted will be autorun on that drive since it 'belongs' to that vbox child. Operations called for the smaller resource MD will be executed in the background and output will be remotely displayed along with 'owned' USB ports etc.
Wall
Living Room | Den
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TV | TV
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Chassis |
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Final note on the above setup. I am not sure if a vbox child can 'own' a drive that does not contain media. I believe an empty port first belongs to the host and only after something hits it can it be released and taken over by a vbox child. That would need to be experimented on. Good Luck
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