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March 16, 2007
Windows does it yet again - Linux and VMWare comes to the rescue
Yet again in a matter of moments my machine went from being a perfectly functionable machine to a wheezing, cantankerous slug-a-bed. Why?
Well, Windows decided that it needed to update itself to patch some crap that a previous update had broken. After a restart the new patch would send my firewall spiraling off into 100% CPU usage for no good reason (...) leaving my computer unable to access the internet and useless for any work-related activities.
Damn.
And I had a deadline for the next day.
Double damn.
Actually, fuck. Fuck Microsoft. Hard.
Question : How can I claim to be a Linux fan and still be running Windows virtually on every machine I own? read on...
Luckily I have had Ubuntu languishing on my hard drive ready to be used when Thunderbird runs successfully on it - that's all that is stopping me...
With no choice (and rapidly approaching 3am) I decide to ht the hay and make the final(ish) change to Linux on the morrow.
Well, I did (biting the bullet a little in spots...), and It's been great so far - I even had Thunderbird running stable for a brief period (the answer is to run it as 'root' - which causes its own issues - attachments and the ilk will need some CHOWN love). But unfortunately it mangled the email and stopped working - soon my pretty...
I do ASP.NET development so I need to be able to access my Windows Server from my laptop.
For remote desktop I installed and configured the fantastic rdesktop to run over SSH tunnels (as I had done with remote desktop in Windows using puTTY). To tunel over SSH in Linux:
ssh remote_ssh_server -L 3389:remote_windows_machine_on_ssh_server_domain:3389
That sets up a nice secure tunnel for the remote desktop to wander through, safe from the slings and arrows of the wibbly-wobbly-internets.
rdesktop is called thus:
rdesktop localhost -f -a 16 -z -P -u Windows_machine_login_username
Where:
-f : fulscreen (swap back to Linux by hitting Ctrl + Alt + Enter)
-a 16 : 16 bit colour
-z : use compression
-P : cache bitmaps
Shock, horror - the performance of rdesktop (an open-source project) is far superior to the native Windows offering. Very impressed. I mean FAR superior! Did I mention that its free?
So now I can access my Windows development server from anywhere in the world - rock and roll!
I still have to do a lot of graphics and Flash based work so I stil lneed to keep Windows around in some form.
This is where the fantastic VMWare server comes into play. I have this running on my laptop with a Windows XP virtual machine in residence. I connect to that using rdesktop too - the performance is much better than using the VMWare console.
My development Server is also a virtual machine running under Linux - the same box that runs the SSH server.
So, the answer to the question above - its a trick I do have windows running on every machine - but virtually :D
Posted by dottie at March 16, 2007 11:31 PM
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