> Nevertheless, I must add that this is one reason why I haven't > installed Plan9 on my systems at home - there are more people than > computers here, and I can't lose all my context (of active windows, > etc), when my wife needs to check her email, or my daughter wants to > paint a picture....
I was thinking, when Russ suggested that the infrastructure for changing ID without rebooting was a possibility, that we'd lose the extreme reliability of the current approach. That need not be true, either, as the reboot option is unlikely to go away. That said, a stand-alone Plan 9 device seems to need better specification, I'm sure a CPU server is perfectly capable of sharing its console to different users at different times. But different logins on different windows (as Martin seems to suggest) would be more complicated. I guess somebody ought to give the idea some careful thought and suggest an implementation. Specially where we actually want the stand-alone device to be more of a workstation than a CPU server, yet we need local authentication and device management. ++L
