Man, this is amazing. i never thought it would be possible. It actually work seamless?
This can very well revamp my small 3 ppl company, i can have 1 employer doing 3d modelling while another do Pages work and i respond to some e-mails.....in my Hex Mac Pro and avoid the hole let me use your computer thing
It would take a bit of fiddling to setup but yes, it would work, You'd only really want to do the 3d modelling on the setup that has direct access though due to 3D acceleration.
Is your spare keyboard the same as your main keyboard?
No, my main keyboard is one of the current gen Aluminium keyboards with numpad while the second keyboard is an old Apple Pro keyboard - the ones with the black keys.
I hate to be the killjoy here, but wouldn't this setup be more expensive, more complicated, and slower than just buying a Mac Mini as a second machine?
The VM won't even have graphics acceleration available to it. And I think everyone has missed the original point of only having to buy software once. Legally (and activation wise), the VM isn't going to fix that.
No, it wouldn't be more expensive unless you went the Snow Leopard Server route. If you're prepared to do a bit of hacking to get Snow Leopard standard working in VMWare Fusion then all you'd need (apart from screens) is a licences for SL for each setup and VMWare Fusion - an OSX family pack would likely do. If you go the whole hog with the VNC/VMWare route then you'd just need a license for VMWare Fusion. Of course it's complicated but basically the more effort you're prepared to put in to the setup, the more money you could save.
Edit: With the VNC method (just giving it a try now) you might run into screen setup issues when changing screen resolutions etc but if you use identical sized monitors in your setup and make sure that each user's screens are set up like the layout I linked earlier then this shouldn't be too much of a problem.
Edit 2: Actually, I just tried it again and it did work with changing the resolution for the second user. I was just limited to the resolutions capable by my main display (so couldn't set it up to 1200x1600 portrait to fit nicely into my second display). It all seemed to work just as expected.
One computer running one copy of Snow Leopard with two clients:
Second display is running Linux Scientific 5.5 and is using vncviewer to connect to Vine Server running with port 5901 on a user activated via Fast User Switching running at a different resolution to the primary setup (accessing only one display - second display is moved to awkward location as I suggested earlier in this thread). VMWare is passing full control of my mouse and secondary keyboard to Scientific Linux which in turn is passing it straight to the second user.
The only reason the second user view isn't full screen is because the portrait resolution of my second display isn't listed in the options - this could probably be fixed if necessary via SwitchResX though. The only real problem that I can see is that VMWare's little top menu bar remains on screen at all times when the VMware isn't active by the primary user (which will always be the case in such a setup).
