OSX & 2 monitors/mice/keyboards

[MacNoobie]

I've got an event coming up that I'm trying to use a 24" alu iMac (due to limited space) in presenting photos taken after a ski race. The slideshows most likely going to be a cooliris thing where people can interactively play with the shots zoom in and out and do everything in 3D. My question is I'd like to be able to set it up so they have their own keyboard/mouse for interacting with the presentation and my own screen (which I'd have another monitor for) and a keyboard/mouse that I can work on the photos. I also dont really see any place for a second monitor so not sure how that'd work..

I'm not sure if this is more of a VMware issue where I can have 2 OSX sessions going or if I can use 2 different users logged into the system at once. I've already ruled out the use of spaces as both sets of keyboard & mice would interfere.

My only other option might be to drag along my macpro which I know can do dual displays and hide the tower under any desk we have setup just the issue of VMware or 2 users.

 

[MacNoobie]

So no one out there know if this can be done? I've got a MacPro I'm thinking of taking instead of the iMac since I can easily hook up 2 monitors to it graphically but I'm wondering how to run 2 separate OSX's side by side or have 2 logins so that 1 screen has its own keyboard/mouse and another screen has its own keyboard and mouse also.

 

[Mal]

No matter what, you cannot have two separate keyboards and mice hooked up and running independently without interfering. That interaction is integral to the system at a very low level. What you're trying to do is make one computer into two, which you're not really going to pull off.

jW

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Yeah I cannot think of a way to operate 2 users simultaneously. You can only have one account active at a time.

Now what you could do is take both the Mac Pro and iMac and setup one machine as the "Guest" computer and the other as your workstation. From there you could VNC into the guest machine to control anything (or just observe if you want). This I think would be the way to go.

 

[MacNoobie]

Interesting take I kind of wanted to avoid taking both due to space but its a possibility of having both machines though at that point I wouldn't do any VNC maybe use a cat 5 to setup a local network from the MacPro to the iMac so that I can copy photos from one machine to the other for presentation purposes and use the MacPro to download/upload to the internet.