funny user moment (and perhaps a bug)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 08:20 -0800, Per Bjornsson wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-15 at 14:37 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > Standard situations:
> > * You login into your personal "desktop" in your office, and leave for
> > another room, on the same network and want to login there ... 
> > * Several monitors on your desktop physically connected to different
> > machines, but with a common and shared (networked) /home underneath.
> 
> Actually that is very different from logging in several times on the
> same machine. (Unless you use LTSP I guess, but that's not what you
> said.)
I don't know what LTSP is  ;)

Actually the situation I am talking about is quite simple:
shared/networked /home on a file server, several desktop client
machines.

>  logging in multiple times on separate machines sharing a
> networked /home is supposed to be supported in Gnome; it has been
> problematic occasionally but that's because of bugs.
Well, the situation isn't as problematic as it used to be, but it still
is far from being perfect, IMO.

This starts with different machines having different screen
resolutions/sizes and GNOME not being able to cope with this, over
various tiny probs in sharing files and ends with running several
instances of desktop applications in parallel on different machines,
using the same /home underneath.

Questions such as
* How do/do applications detect other instances are sharing their
resources (e.g. preferences, caches, desktop setup)? 
* How are user-customized machine-specific setups handled (e.g. having
added hard-ware specific desktop applets)?

as far as I can tell, to a large extend, these cases aren't handled
"that well" at all in any GUI-toolkit/Desktop, but are left to be
handled in applications and by the user ("don't run 2 instances of
XXX").

Ralf