[Preston] KDE and GNOME in Windows (using Cygwin/XFree86 and XDMCP)

[Andrew King]

Hello there all,

Partly in reply to what Phil just said (topics to cover at meetings),
I've now found out how to get remote KDE, Gnome, twm, Blackbox (etc)
desktops in a Window on a Windows machine, using entirely free software
other than Windows itself (you just need Cygwin/XFree86 for Windows).

This is a huge potential breakthrough for people like me who have a
Windows network to look after - it means suddenly I can give everyone an
icon on their desktop that takes them straight to a (pretty much) full
screen KDE login. Within under 10 seconds they suddenly have access to
all the thousands of nice programs we used to having access to, and
because we're running Samba, they have a link to the home directory on
the UNIX desktop that's the N:\ drive on their Windows desktops.

I'm planning to roll this out. Naturally, it'll get ignored and people
will use all the usual pathetic FUD reasons for avoiding non-Windows
like the plague, but as soon as people say "How could I do this?" and I
show them how they can do <whatever> nice and easily through Gnome or
KDE, they might start to like it.

Anyway - planning on writing a short howto on getting GNOME/KDE to work
in Windows over XDMCP, that just tells you how to do it for the
mainstream distributions, and lists all the things that go wrong.  But
if people are interested then I'm sure we could demonstrate this at a
future Linux meeting.  I could prepare a Windows laptop and a Debian 
laptop beforehand and bring them with me.

Just a thought.

Andrew