Multi-user mac?

Vine
1

Hi,

I am VERY curious about the Multi-user remote VNC solution offered.

http://www.testplant.com/multidesktop.html

Is this the only software (Vine) that provides this function or are there other ways?

Also, lets say I used this, would two people be able to run photoshop at the same time on the same computer? I guess photoshop would prevent two copies of the same program being run at the same time?
How about other software, this is a concern if one user tried to open email window and the other tried to open email as well, and they conflict in some way. Either they prevent it from happening or some corruption?

Thanks, Philip

2

Vine Server is not the only tool which can be used to do this although as far as I am aware it is the most cost effective and VNC clients (like our Vine Viewer for Mac) are the most readily available for cross-platform access.

Different programs behave differently in this environment. I honestly have no idea about Photoshop. My guess is that it would work but that really depends on the license. Also keep in mind that something very process intensive (like Photoshop) is going to be taxing on the machine if you run several copies. I can guarantee that two (or more) users can run your basic applications like Mail, Safari, etc. just fine. The one thing to watch out for is only the primary (console) user has access to physical devices (like sound out, mic in, camera).

Feel free to try it out and post your results here.

3

Any VNC server that runs on the Mac should allow you to do this. Vine is a very good VNC server and it’s freely available. You are correct that you might have trouble running two instances of Photoshop (or a similarly licensed application) at the same time, but it might work. I regulary run Mail and other applications under two users simultaneously with no problems. You would just need to experiment a bit to find which applications allow simultaneous execution and which don’t. The main issue to be aware of is whether you have enough memory to support multiple users – even if you are able to run two instances of Photoshop, it will take twice as much RAM as running a single instance, so if you have a minimally configured Mac, you should consider loading it up with memory if you want acceptable performance for multiple users.

4

Thanks for the help.

Actually MAC’s are expensive, well always have been but have a lot of great software. The problem is within a small company we don’t want to buy everyone a MAC with OSX, but we want a few users to be able to use some MAC applications. Who is using MAC software might change from day to day.

My first thought was, could I use OSX on a Virtual Machine, but that only works on Apple hardware (if I follow the law). Then I looked at other ways like the cheaper clone hardware, also not legal.

So this seems like a good idea, if I have a program that I need more than one user to access at the same time, like a database schema editor which looks really nice in the MAC but I can’t find for other OS’s.
I could have two programmers using it via VNC.

Well thats the general idea, more RAM seems to be the way to go.

Philip