Newbie question: multi-seat advice needed

[Dan Nicholson]

On 4/13/12, Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com> wrote:
> I have a system with 3 video cards:
>
> 01:06.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34GL [Quadro NVS
> 280 PCI] (rev a1)
> 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44 [Quadro NVS
> 285] (rev a1)
> 04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G96 [GeForce 9500
> GT] (rev a1)
>
>  I just upgraded to the latest ubuntu, which comes with a recent xorg:
>
> X.Org X Server 1.10.4
> Release Date: 2011-08-19
>
> I am somewhat confused (actually really confused) on the status of
> xorg.conf.
>
> I read that xorg.conf is deprecated and that I should use xorg.conf.d -
> but at the same time X -configure creates an xorg.conf...
>
> Can I just go ahead and use xorg.conf to set up my 3 heads?  I need to
> create it manually as this will be a multi-seat machine.  I plan to
> create 3 different layouts and start X for each seat that way.

As the person who wrote the xorg.conf.d feature, I can tell you that
there's no actual difference between the two. Xorg just reads
xorg.conf and all the files in xorg.conf.d and flattens them into one
long buffer. Deprecating xorg.conf makes more sense for packages where
the code to muck with someone's xorg.conf is pretty fragile. Instead,
they can just drop in their own file under xorg.conf.d.

For your own system, feel free to put the configuration wherever you
feel comfortable. I suspect you have a separate ServerLayout for each
head, and so long as no packages are adding ServerLayout sections to
their .conf files, you still have full control wherever your
configuration comes in the chain.

--
Dan