EASYSEATS
  • Main

EasySeats .08

2/7/2020

4 Comments

 
After a much longer amount of time than I had anticipated, The next release of EasySeats is available.  This is a very nice update and when I compared how version 7 works, and I am very happy with the current functionality.

For this release, large parts of the program have been re-written.  There have been significant code re-factors and more efficient code reuse which all work to make the program more dynamic when syncing with loginctl.  Second and third and more seats are automatically recognized now, and there is additional logging and error handling.  The functionality for reading from a text file instead of directly from terminal has been removed.  If you need the ability to read a text file instead of reading directly from the terminal for an older distro, version 7 is the last to have this capability.

With the more dynamic nature of this release, EasySeats now keeps a copy of the seats and their status in a series of arrays.  During testing I tried moving, removing, adding, and more, devices to various seats back and forth and it always worked for me.  The one way to produce an error is to assign a seat and then press "cancel" when the root password dialog comes up.  EasySeats assumes that when you move mouse number 2 to seat number 2, that you intend to do this after you press the assign button.  When the root password dialog comes up, the seat number assignment has already been made in the status arrays.

To restore, clear all status and re-get the seats.  To download, the jar file has been uploaded to the releases folder:
https://github.com/ezst036/EasySeats-releases

One of the big reasons that this release was delayed so long was a bug that I ran into that I could not figure out.  My suspicion is that there is a Java versioning issue.  In one of my methods there is a counter variable that is set to 1 instead of zero.  I'm still not sure with 100% certainty, but in order to get this working on multiple distros I put a check in the method that looks at the Java version.  If the Java version is older than 1.9, the counter is incremented.  If not, it stays at zero.

I have several distros that I develop and test on, and in this instance the older version of Fedora I have and the newer version of Ubuntu require different handling for the increment. Hopefully this can be ironed out in the next version.  I will most likely be upgrading several of my computers soon to newer distros, which I think will help bring the issue to its conclusion.

For future testing purposes, I think this version could be very useful.  There is additional logging available by launching EasySeats via the terminal instead of double clicking the jar file.
4 Comments
Lawrence Boothby link
3/28/2020 11:03:38 am

My last email was blocked so trying here instead. See my updates at http://www.multi-seat.com/phisteck-ze7000/

I can now mix usb connected and network attached zero clients with automatic seat assignment and naming for both in /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/71-seat.rules.

I am writing from a Phistek ZE7000 network attached zero client locked to a CentOS 7.7 host computer. If you have a used legacy Atrust m220 or HP T200 with a Displaylink usb video adapter plugged into one of the T200's USB ports, you can try this without the pricey ZE7000 that Phistek donated to me. Looks like the EST chip used in all current network attached zero clients will be discontinued so all that hardware should become very cheap on eBay.

Reply
Lawrence Boothby link
4/1/2020 09:19:43 pm

4-01-2020

I have just posted GUI scripts for enabling/disabling automatic seat creation for the HP T150 USB zero client and a second GUI script for enabling/disabling network attached zero clients such as the Phistek ZE7000.

Next I will look into GUI scripts for starting and stopping the EST nhci service for network attached zero clients and a GUI script for listing, resetting, locking, and unlocking specific networked zero clients to specific hostnames.

Reply
Josh
8/13/2020 12:07:56 pm

Looking forward to trying this out! I've got a 3-seat system at home that I use for the kids, and have dreaded upgrading my distro (elementary has no automatic upgrade path) because of all the manual work I had to put in to get multiseat working to begin with. It was fun the first time around, but I'm not interested in doing it a second time. This GUI looks like it's exactly what I need. I'll dig around for a donation link, but in case you don't have one, how do I contribute?

Reply
ezst036
9/5/2020 01:08:07 pm

Hello,

The best way to contribute for now is simply test and report, or let others who multi seat know about this effort. When I initially created EasySeats I tested on many distros, but I am not sure if Elementary was one of them. In the last few releases, I did not have as much testing. Let me know your experience if you could as it would be very helpful.

I just recently noticed someone had an issue which was reported (in case this was you) and I pushed a small update to hopefully correct the issue as presented.

Thanks

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    EasySeats

    EasySeats is open source software developed to bring ease to users who choose to go multi-seat.  It supports video cards for seat creation as well as external USB docks.

    Archives

    April 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Main