Kernel Does Support Many Input Devices

Posted Aug 23, 2007 2:08 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (guest, #2285)
In reply to: Where I can rant and whine on Linus Torvals? by marraco
Parent article: The 2005 Linux Kernel Developers' Summit

The kernel is not the problem here. The problem is your configuration of the X server.

My laptop has seven input devices listed by the kernel. The built-in keyboard, the trackpad, the external USB keyboard and mouse and various special buttons.

I configure X to use all of these on one display, but X could also be configured to run different servers with different input devices for each server.

Try copying your /etc/X11/xorg.conf to a new filename, change its Input sections, and run a second X server on virtual terminal 8 using the new config file.

As for console sessions, I don't remember the name of the program, but you use the same trick with framebuffer displays and a user-space console manager. The manager program reads input from the specified devices and draws it to the framebuffer. A full-screen xterm makes more sense to me though.