James and Jeff - Thankyou very much for your responses. I've tried both suggestions and they both work fine. Pressing <crtl><alt><F8> is a hell of a lot easier than having to log out of one account and logging into the other!
I've had this arrangement on my desktop for years so that the better half and myself can share the machine as Shuan described. One thing that I wanted to do was have the GDM login screen display which virtual screen it was running on, but never managed to get this to work. I was able to do it for the shell running on f1-f2, but I couldn't get which tty gdm was running on into the welcome message.
I also never managed to solve the sound lock out problem. My system is running esd, and in theory esd sould manage/mix multiple audio out requests, but when the first user logs in and esd gets started, the esd process is owned by that user. Something also sets the permissions on the audio device to be u+rw only for that user, i.e no group prviledges. If as root you overrode the audio device to be g+rw, then the second user could play sound, but as soon as the first user logged out, esd died and the permissions of the audio device went back to root ownership. A better solution would obviously be for esd to be a system process started in /etc/init.d with a config somewhere that allowed the admin to define which users had access.
I never found out which bit of code was setting the privledges but it smacks of "we know better" something we all critise Microsoft of and an attitude that is detectable in Jeff's postings on this subject. I think jeff should take a few humility pills, and perhaps maybe accept that even if he does know better, as end users, that's not what we want. I've actually given up using Gnome because I just don't like the direction the development is going. This is of course a personal thing and others may love it but for me Gnome has just become annoying. I can't get it to do what I want and I constantly have to battle to get it to stop doing things that I don't want it to do. Nautilus taking over my desktop is another example.
Whilst some of his arguments about dynamically running processes etc are somewhat valid, but we also know that when processes aren't in active use, the magic linux kernel tends to swap them out and recover the memory, which is so cheap and plentiful these days anyway that the whole argument is just "so last centuary" Besides, the collary to that is Gnome now has an even bigger memory foot print containing functionality that I don't want. Also his just argued that we should get rid of the ctrl-alt-f1 etc to drop to a shell and include it into Gnome, because it's just another user session, and those mingettys man they must be chewing up CPU and memory! ;-)
Cheers
P.
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
