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rml posted some use cases for Project Utopia.  If they can solve these issues smoothly (which I’m pretty sure they’ll pull off), Linux will take a big jump in terms of general plug’n’play usability.

Unfortunately, the use cases miss out on one of my favorite new features - multi-session X.  You can easily start two X servers on two different virtual consoles right now, but the new gdm stuff will support suspending and resuming X sessions, as well as nested X servers.  This will help Linux catch up to the cool multi-user login features of Windows XP. 

It’s tricky to get this working well in Linux right now - there’s a bunch of magic that goes on behind the scenes to make sure the console user gets the proper permissions.  This stuff needs to get upgraded to handle this multi-session magic.

I’ve got a solution where I’ve added all of my potential console users to a “console” group and assigned root.console to each of the devices that console users might need (ie: /dev/nvidiactl, /dev/dsp).  This works for now, but I’d like to see this handled via ACLs or some other fancy way.