I recently mentioned that one could dump the desktop (GNOME or KDE) on a virtualized Linux and use Vista’s (with a little assist from Cygwin XServer) to seamlessly integrate Linux and Windows. All this care of coLinux. If you are working with Windows and Linux, then that is the way that I recommend.
Of course there is VNC. If you have gobs of RAM (you will need it) then you can go another way. Have a separate window (the vnc client or viewer) displaying a complete GNOME or KDE desktop. To be honest, if you want to do it this way, then there are many other virtualization solutions that will run a full machine with less hassle, but then more than likely you will have lost the point of my approach.
My goal was to fit one or multiple Linux distros into a not unlimited amount of RAM. You can then use real development tools (big fat IDEs) and applications on this configuration with all your platforms live at the same time and on the same box. Think about it, you can work on your Windows box with 2 major Linux variants, like a RedHat and Debian based distro (that package quite differently), whilst also developing and testing on Windows. I do this on my notebook with 2GB RAM.
Nonetheless, if you get your bridged networking configured, have installed VNC on your coLinux distro, then an option is to crank up a vnc server, uncomment the 2 lines in
~/.vnc/xstartup
and export your display to the host IP address that your XServer is running on. Then run your vncviewer.
Here I give you the RAM hungry approach with my Fedora 10 coLinux and a full activated GNOME desktop, all via VNC. But maybe you’ll want a 4GB machine :-) But please understand, you can run your GNOME dev tools and applications without a GNOME desktop in place. This technique might make things a little faster, a little leaner and maybe you, a little more agile ;-) Have fun!
Fedora 10 / GNOME on coLinux via vnc viewer
Interesting!
I see that you use Cygwin with running a RealVNC (Linux version) of Xvnc.
However you don’t tell what kind of vnc server you use under Fedora.
Maybe vnc4server or vino?
Beside that, can you help me to get installed Xvnc under Cygwin?
Because I use Ubuntu (vino) I also want the best performances I get get with VNC viewer under Windows.
Kind regards,
Melroy van den Berg
Melroy
I’ll try to answer what you ask, but excuse any extra information
My main Linux is also Ubuntu which is the default boot option on my machine, and so I run native with no VNC requirement (of course).
If I choose to boot with Windows (VISTA SP1) then I have, installed, both Cygwin and coLinux for Linux / POSIX type functionality.
Presently I use Cygwin’s XServer as front-end and Fedora 10 as back-end.
I can start a cygwin shell and crank up an XServer
$ sh startxwin.sh
which gives me a hidden XServer on my Vista desktop (to run my cygwin X apps along with my windows apps, i.e. side by side)
Running up my Fedora as well, and working from the coLinux console
$ rpm -qa | grep -i vnc-server
vnc-server-4.1.3-1.fc.i386
$ export DISPLAY=10.1.1.67:0.0
$ gnome-text-editor &
pops up the gedit on my vista desktop :-)
This approach is usually enough for my needs when using Linux virtualized.
However, one can run up a vnc client from the coLinux console (i.e. from the same Fedora terminal)
$ vncviewer
which again displays to the cygwin XServer (and yes, it is realvnc 4.1.3 for X)
With regards your performance question, I prefer to use the Cygwin XServer for Fedora XApps that I might use! But make sure you have addressed performance via memory allocated to the Fedora instance under coLinux – both main memory and swap!
I don’t actually have a cygwin VNC! My hint is that it isn’t necessary when one can use a Windows one! The windows one should actually run faster (the Vista desktop is native and so faster than the Cygwin XServer, perhaps!)
FYI I have VNC-4_1_x. Just get the latest and double click…
I hope this steers you in the correct direction
regards
Alex