[K12OSN] one more time

Petre Scheie petre at maltzen.net
Tue Mar 1 14:46:19 UTC 2005



Sudev Barar wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-02-28 at 13:34 -0600, Petre Scheie wrote:
> 
>>2a. Install an X server on the Windows boxes.  The X-LiveCD allows you 
>>to run the CygWin X server from a CD, and it also has an option to 
>>install the X server on the Windows machine (the installer has a few 
>>bugs regarding the icons and menu choices it's supposed to add, but the 
>>actual X server installs without problems).  If you're trying to get to 
>>the point of users just clicking on an icon and having it automatically 
>>connect to the Linux app server and loading the Gimp, say, you'll have 
>>to setup encryption keys with SSH & putty, and use those to 
>>automatically launch the apps.  I haven't done this, but it's an 
>>interesting problem; but it may require more effort than step 2b below.
> 
> [SNIP]
> 
> Did more or less what you have described to run evolution mail client on
> a remote win desktop. Works if you go through all settings of PuTTY
> properly, especially those that deal with X forwarding.
> 
>  Maybe since I was on remote location the speed of display rendering was
> a big problem. End of the day I found much easier (and lot faster!!) to
> just use PuTTY and mutt for reading mail.
> 
> Let us get feed back on how this progresses.

I've found that even with compression (via ssh), running X applications 
across the public internet is painful at best.  It's certainly easier 
than driving to the remote location in a pinch, but not practical for 
regular users.  I actually get better performance if I tunnel VNC over 
ssh, either using at 'ssh -L 3700:localhost:5900 remotehost' command and 
then pointing vncviewer at localhost:3700, or using the -via switch with 
the vncviewer from the TightVNC package.  I think it extracts a greater 
load on the remote host, and again, not usable for regular users; but it 
works pretty well for quick-n-dirty access to a remote graphical app.

Petre




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