Re: X Terminals help appreciated

[Ruediger Berlich <nospam [at] suse.de>]

Hi,

> 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.

There is another possibility : X has the '-indirect IP-Address' switch,
which connects to a remote xdm session (works with KDM as well). The X
server then very much behaves like a real X terminal, i.e., there is no
need for a local setup of e.g. Yellow Pages. After having chosen the
remote machine from the menue, you will get the standard KDM or xdm login
window of the target machine. On your local machine you will then only
need a minimal system (i.e., the core OS + X). No need for client
programs, they can be stored on one central host.

Of course you can also go the DISPLAY-route as explained by Alex above.
As in the case of '-indirect', you could have almost all data locally on
one server by doing NFS-mounts of /home or data directories (Star-Office,
etc.). I would assume, that the network load of this solution is
significantly lower than with the '-indirect' switch, however '-indirect'
rquires less configuration on the client machines. So it is basically a
question of the kind of hardware you're using.

Ruediger

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