remote xdm
by the end of this year (fingers crossed), we will release the next version of our Genedata Screener® software. most developers in our team do their daily work on SuSE linux platforms. however, the officially supported client platform is windows XP. consequently, we all have to switch to XP during the final testing/bugfixing iterations. while working on XP, I normally use ssh with X forwarding to still be able to use some of my favorite linux apps. I use cygwin/X as an X server on the windows machine (simply because it is easy to install and free as in beer). last week I struggled with a lot of OS-dependent bugs (java rocks: write once, debug everywhere) and therefore had to spend more time on XP than usual. this seemed to justify a small investment into optimizing my working environment (this will ring a bell for people who know me well enough ;-)). rather than cluttering up XP with a lot of X windows, I wanted to be able to connect to one complete SuSE/KDE session. this turned out to be simpler than I had expected:
- on linux: enable XDMCP (XDisplay Manager Control Protocol) by editing /etc/opt/kde3/share/config/kdm/kdmrc:
[Xdmcp] Enable=true - on linux: specify the connection port by editing /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config:
DisplayManager.requestPort: 177 - on linux: restart the display manager:
rcxdm start - on windows: write a batch file to connect to linux. with cygwin/X, something along these lines will do:
@echo off SET CYGWIN_ROOT=c:\cygwin SET PATH=.;%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin;%CYGWIN_ROOT%\usr\X11R6\bin;%PATH% start /B XWin.exe -screen 0 1280 1024 -query 192.168.1.35 -once -dpi 86 -ac -from %COMPUTERNAME%(needless to say that you have to adjust the path and IP...) - have a lot of fun ;-)
if you don't have a linux box at hand but would still like to give this a try: vmware has recently released a free player version of their software. together with this free browser appliance virtual machine (a slick ubuntu linux image), you'll be all set to play around. with this image you don't even need to fiddle around with config files. instead, simply launch System | Administration | Login Screen Setup... from the menu bar and do the required edits on the XDMCP tab. after successful connection, you'll be greeted with a screen like this one:
(o.k., I admit it, I didn't get any further than this screen. however, this just serves as a proof of concept anyway and even for me it seemed beyond justification to investigate the details (probably related to read-only vmware player issues?))
btw: the vmware-player/browser combination is also a handy companion if you need to download something from a website which you don't trust too much (e.g. when looking for crackz/serialz or alike). simply because you can work in a well isolated, non-m$ environment, so no script-kiddies can do you any harm...
to this phase
seems to be a gradual and smooth process.
