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
