Re: X Terminals help appreciated

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 2 Dec 1999, Steve Tickle wrote:

> I have been volunteered(?!) to investigate whether it is workable for our
> company to migrate from Windoze95 to Linux.

Heh, good luck ;))

> The Linux distribution that we are working with is Mandrake-Linux 6.0

Nice choice (self confessed Mandrake addict here), but do consider 6.1:
6.0 had some problems (not necessarily Mandrake's fault), and 6.1 also has
a lot of other stuff in it which makes it easier to use, etc.

> I am currently trying to configure a Linux OS'ed PC to access another by
> this method (using xdm) but am struggling to find the right level of
> documentation to do this. As a Linux newbie I don't have the prior depth of
> knowledge assumed by some of the HOWTOs etc.
>
> Can you please point me in the right direction?

By 'X terminal', I presume you want to set up the PCs to access the server
and run graphical programs across the network? For those who've never used
a VT100 terminal (I'm sitting writing this on a DEC VT510 myself ;),
they're basically equivilent to xterm: just a text-based interface to a
login system, except VTs are hardware things that usually operate over a
serial line.

An X terminal is capable of running programs on a remote server than
appear locally; much like the vaunted 'thin client' idea. There's not a
great deal to this. If you're just running a text program, you can make
the computer behave as a VT100 by either running xterm, or by switching to
a virtual terminal (ctrl-alt-f2, for example), use the telnet program to
login to the remote server and use it as if you were sitting at a terminal
local to the server.

Running X programs is similarly easy. First, you tell your local X box
the name of the machine you wish to access; to add it to the control list.
This is done by 'xhost +myserver.localdomain', where myserver.localdomain
is the name of the server you wish to run a program on, and + signifies
you wish to add it to the control list. Then, you login into the server
using telnet (for example). If $DISPLAY is not set ('echo $DISPLAY' will
be a blank line if it is not), you set $DISPLAY by
'DISPLAY=xbox.localdomain:0.0' (NOTE: this may be different for different
shells. If it doesn't work, try 'set DISPLAY=..', or 'export DISPLAY ..').
DISPLAY is the variable which tells the remote server where you wish the
application to display, and may be on any machine, and indeed any display
on the machine if it is multi-headed (that's what the :0.0 business is
about). Then, you just type the command for the program you wish to run
(i.e., 'netscape'), and up it comes..

This seems pretty tricky at first sight, really it's not! You can wrap all
of this up in a script, which makes things much easier, and you can do
things like launch remote apps from a single click on your desktop icon.
If you do need any help, please do ask me - I'm a Mandrake user myself,
and I've done a lot of stuff like this before. It looks difficult at the
start, but it isn't really.

Cheers,

Alex.

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