[Lancaster] The answer will be no!

[Richard Robinson]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 03:29:23PM +0100, Ken Hough wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 April 2009 12:49:05 andy baxter wrote:
> > Rik Boland wrote:
> > > This may sound stupid and the answer will be no but just in case.
> > >
> > > If I get a tower box, could I then use my laptop as it's monitor and
> > > keyboard but use the box processing power?
> >
> > The answer is yes in fact - you can use the laptop as an 'X terminal'.
> > I.e. the tower box runs the programs but it sends information about
> > what's on the screen to the laptop over the network. Someone else might
> > be able to give you a bit more info if you want to try this.
> >
> > andy
> 
> I agree with Andy.
> ...
> You can find a mini-howto at:
> <http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XDM-Xterm/>
> This document is a few years old, but should give you a start.
> 
> If you Google "Howto X Terminal", other links will come up.


Seconded. It's suprisingly easy.

I don't usually have more than one machine at once, but last year I briefly
had 2, and played with getting at stuff on the old one, using the new one as
a terminal. Not the sort of stuff I usually play with, then, and I was
expecting it to be scary. It isn't.

Ethernet them together, and set up a local network so's they know about each
other. I forget how you need to do that, but not difficult. edit
/etc/network/interfaces on the remote machine to tell the ethernet card what
its address should be, I think. Pick one from one of the local-address
ranges - 192.168.x.y or whatever. Give that address a name in the other
(terminal) machine's /etc/hosts to make it easier to remember, if you like.

Then put an ssh server on the one you want to talk to, and an ssh client on
the one you want to do it from. Might have to fiddle a little with the
config files, but there's nothing unearthly. Then "ssh 192.168.x.y", and
login to the remote machine exactly as if the screen & keyboard were
connected to it.

And that's text mode, commandline stuff.

If you want GUI stuff, give it an extra switch - connect with "ssh -X
192.168.x.y"; or -Y, I forget what the difference is. And then, when you
start a GUI program from the cli, the processing, disk-accesses, etc, will
happen on the remote box, and display on the screen in front of you.

The terminology of this is confusing - the remote machine running the gui
program is the client, the one in front of you, with the keyboard / mouse /
screen, is the server (because it does the screen/etc work, for the
program-elsewhere that needs it).

I think you'd be limited to running individual GUI programs, I'm not sure
you could get the whole remote-machine's Gnome/KDE desktop environment going
this way (VPN ?). But if you can get a file-manager started, it'll do
the right thing, anyway.

"HTH"

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem