Remote desktop access -- more experimentation.

Well, there certainly is no shortage of means to let you access and control a distant desktop from the comfort of your own desk as shown in this article.
As I had had some problems with xncviewer, particularly from KuruminNG (Dell), I decided to try one other app listed in this article. This was x11vnc.
First, I tried to access Foresight (on the Dell) from Ubuntu (on the Mac). The steps are very simple and are as follows:
1. Download/Install x11vnc on the remote desktop (Foresight-Dell). For this I used:

sudo conary update x11vnc=@fl:2-devel

2. Start up the remote server by typing this in a terminal
x11vnc -display :0
3. In the client (your own computer or Ubuntu-Mac in my case), type this
vncviewer 192.168.1.12:0
and almost immediately, Foresight's desktop appeared on the Mac. Note that sshd was NOT running on Foresight at the time and NO passwords at all were required. Absolutely nothing, very quick and problem-free.

Note that in Ubuntu, I needed to download xtightvncviewer (one of four suitable apps available) before vncviewer would work.
Really, this whole thing, including the downloads, installs and connections could easily be set up in less than 5 minutes.

Flushed with this success, I tried to see if I could control KuruminNG (Dell) from Ubuntu-Mac. Here the steps were:
1. Install x11vnc in Kurumin

sudo apt-get install x11vnc

2. In a Kurumin terminal, type

x11vnc -display :0

3. In Ubuntu-Mac, type

vncviewer 192.168.1.12:0

Once again, connection was almost immediate with no requests for passwords or anything else.

Now, the area where I had a problem with Kurumin before, controlling another Linux desktop from Kurumin as client. So, for this I tried:

1. Install x11vnc in Ubuntu-Mac

sudo apt-get install x11vnc

2. In Ubuntu type

x11vnc -display :0

3. In Kurumin type

vncviewer 192.168.1.1:0

For the third time, everything worked perfectly, absolutely no flaws whatsoever. However, there was a difference from the last two attempts, in that this time, after the third step in Kurumin (vncviewer), a window appeared in Ubuntu asking did I want to accept or refuse the request to control the desktop. Once I said yes, connection was immediate.

My conclusion based on this very brief and incomplete test is that x11vnc seems quite a marvelous app and well worth trying again.
One big difference from NXserver, is that the client sees exactly what is on the servers screen right now. Also, the clients cursor moves around the servers screen.

Some experimentation with NXserver.

Yesterday I got NXserver working in Kurumin-dell and was able to communicate with nxclient in Ubuntu-mac.
So today I tried to see if any further OSes could be involved in NX.
First I tried to install nxclient in Foresight-Mac. This is not available in the Foresight repos but is readily available here.
I downloaded the nxclient.tar.gz file to /usr and untarred it there. That's all that's needed to install -- no compile or anything else.
Now I was able to NX to Kurumin-dell by

/usr/NX/bin/nxclient &

Now the dialog opened which I left basically as it was for Ubuntu (client) to communicate with Kurumin-Dell (server). So, the Key, the host (IP) and port (8888) remained unchanged. And it connected fine.

Next I tried to get Foresight-Mac (client) to talk to Foresight-Dell (server). This meant having to install NXserver in Foresight-Dell. Again, NXserver is not available in the Foresight repos.
Also, I couldn't use the method of yesterday as this involves some deb repos which (AFAIK) Foresight can't handle.
So I used this nomachine site to try to install the NXFree edition for Linux (as tar.gz). This involves installing three packages (nxclient, nxnode and nxserver). As mentioned, NXclient is very easy to install. Also, I once got the NXnode to install (after many tries) using this command

sudo /usr/NX/scripts/setup/nxnode --install debian

However, I was unable to repeat this. Really don't know why it worked just once. Strange.
Using the same type of command for NXserver never got me anywhere -- always failed.
So, can't get NXserver to install in Foresight.

I was, however, able to get NXserver working on Ubuntu-Dell from the same site. Here I just downloaded the debs (client, node and server) and installed them from the terminal using this commands of this type

sudo dpkg -i nxserver_3.2.0-13_i386.deb

And that was basically it.
I did NOT have to add that big line of code to node.conf. Indeed, I couldn't find any node.conf at all in Ubuntu after installation of the server.
On the client side, however, I needed to import the dsa-key from

/usr/NX/share/keys/default.id_dsa.key

on the server. In addition, I moved the port back from 8888 to 22.
When I logged in on the client, I got a message saying couldn't "start kde". Very strange since I don't have kde on the Ubuntu server. But it turns out that you must specify the Desktop Manager in the dialog before you launch nxclient.
After changing this to Gnome, it launched fine and everything seemed perfect.

VNC from Ubuntu-mac (client) to Kurumin-dell (server)

I had this problem some time ago where I could not VNC from Ubuntu-mac (vino-server) to Kurumin-dell (krfb-kde4). Tried again today with the same negative result.
Then I thought that perhaps it was a kde thing so I tried with Sidux-mac (Kde 3.5.9) which also uses krfb. In Sidux, however, opening krfb results in a dialog box opening which allows you to create invitations. This gives you a password to pass on to the invitee which can then be used to complete the connection. Now I could connect from Kurumin (client) to Sidux (server) but not the other way around. This seems entirely because the krfb dialog doesn't open (although krfb does run) so invitations can't be created.

OK, so maybe it's a KDE4.1 thing. So, I changed session in Kurumin and changed to KDE 3.5.9. For this I had to install krfb (KDE 4.1 uses krfb-kde4). Now krfb does open a dialog box (but seemingly only from a terminal and not from Adept). This then allows creating invitations. So, I invited Sidux as client to connect to Kurumin server. Th connection was briefly made but then krfb crashed (I tried this several times, always with the same result). But, it was progress of a sort. I posted to the Kurumin forum which provides more details.

I got one reply from this post which didn't actually address the problem but recommended that instead of VNC, that I use NXServer to make these connections.
So, I thought I'd give it a try.
First I looked at the freenx home site and tried to install the package from here. But the instructions are poorly presented so I gave up.
Next I came across this blog which outlines an alternative (and more understandable install method) but this too failed for me during the make step.
Then I found this Ubuntu Community document which provides basically everything I needed.

So I set about setting up Kurumin-Dell as the server with Ubuntu-mac as the client and these are the steps:
1. Include the debs in /etc/apt/sources.list (note that I had to use the feisty repos as the freenx stuff seems to have been removed from the Gutsy repo)
2. Get the key, update and install freenx
3. Use these commands as shown in the guide

sudo nxserver --adduser
sudo nxserver --passwd
sudo nxserver --restart

4. NXserver appears to start but there's no indication of this if you run ps -e
5. Change the listening port as instructed in "Configure ssh"
6. Install nxclient on the client (Ubuntu-mac). Here there was a complaint about libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2_2.95.4-27. However, I found the deb for this here and I installed it. Thereafter the nxclient installed fine.
7.Now I tried to connect from the client to the server through NXserver by starting the client with

/usr/NX/bin/nxclient &

This opened up a small dialog box. Here I clicked the configure button where I entered the host IP (192.168.1.12 -- as the hostname didn't work for me) and the Key (8888) that I had already assigned in an earlier step. However, after adding the password, although a connection was made it broke almost immediately.
8. I googled around and found here that the answer is to add this line

AGENT_EXTRA_OPTIONS_X="-fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/,/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/,/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/,/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi"

to /etc/nxserver/node.conf on the server.
9. Now I could make the connection without problems.

One difference with VNC is that NXserver appears more like the RDP system to connect to Windows. This is because the while client can see clearly the server screen, the server user sees nothing of what the client user is doing.
Nevertheless, it does work well and is worth exploring further.

Fixed problems with Login of (k)checkgmail

As I mentioned a few days ago, the upgrade described here is said to eliminate the problem checkgmail developed lately of refusing to log into Gmail.
Well, I tried it in Ubuntu II and it works perfectly -- very quick, too; don't need more than 2 minutes to get the whole thing done.
However, I had basically the same problem with kcheckgmail that I was using in KuruminNG (with KDE 4.1). This was a little less easy to rectify in that it took a lot longer but basically just amounted to upgrading the app to kcheckgmail 5.7.5
To do this, however, you've got to compile from source.
I downloaded from here and then ./configure'd.
Ran into some dependency problems here of which the principal missing ones were: xorg-dev, kdebase-dev, libqt3-headers and libqt3-mt-dev.
Once I got these installed from the KuruminNG repos, the source configured fine. Then, make and sudo make install completed without error.
After that it was just a matter of substituting the new kcheckgmail binary for the one in /usr/bin.

I'll just mention here a useful tip to use if you run into one of these "change the prefix" problems during a compile. The error referred to kde-headers being in a different prefix. To resolve, it was suggested to find the path to the header using

sudo find / -name "kapplication.h"

to find the path and then using this command to do the configure

./configure --prefix=/path/to/headers

Tried VNC today.

I had planned to test this for some time but only got around to it today.
In summary, everything went very well and this is so easy to set up.
This is a useful summary which I used to set things up in Ubuntu and Foresight. However, it contains a lot more than you really need.
Essentially, you just enable Remote Desktop in System>Preferences>Remote Desktop. Now you must install a program to enable you to see the remote screen.
In Ubuntu, a choice of four (vnc-java, tightvnc-java, xtightvncviewer, xvnc4server) is given and I installed xvnc4Server.
I found out what I needed in Foresight by running
conary rq --path=/usr/bin/vncviewer
which gave me three programs. I installed the vnc program.
However, although it seems to be recommended to use the host name to connect to the remote computer, but this simply didn't work for me.
What did work was this

vncviewer 192.168.1.12:0

which includes the IP of the remote computer and the screen number.
Linux-to-Linux asks for a password of the remote computer and that computer than is given the choice of accepting or refusing to allow access.

Kurumin uses a GUI (Krdc) for these connections and provides a choice of either vnc (to a Linux box) or rdp (to a Windows machine).
Strangely, it worked fine when I connected to Margaret's computer (Windows XP) but doesn't work at all for connection to a Linux box. when I try in a terminal (I installed xvncviewer here too), a window labelled with the correct remote host-name opens but nothing appears in it. It's just black.
Strange.

rdesktop works also on both Ubuntu and Foresight and is already installed on both.
In contrast to the Linux-to-Linux connection, connecting Linux to Windows opens a login screen on the client, but no accept/refuse is presented on the Server. Indeed, the server goes back to the login screen and stays there when the client is working on Windows remotely.

Seems that there's no quick solution to IPv6 problems in Foresight.

The problems are as follows:
1) ping6 doesn't work in Foresight
2) while "/etc/init.d/tspc start" works, "/etc/init.d/tspc stop" seems to do exactly the same thing as start.
Also, ifconfig tun after running "/etc/init.d/tspc stop", shows the tun device to be still operational.
In addition, I got no replies to the two requests I posted which probably indicates that my problem is not general, but specific to some peculiarity of my setup.
Actually, it reminds me a bit of the problems I had first with the installation of Yakuake in Foresight. My first attempt was very much of a gambiarra and never worked properly. However, after discovering that a particular dependency was essential, I got it to work perfectly.
Additionally, I installed tspc today in Kurumin (from the repo) and this worked perfectly right out of the box. Plus, it didn't need any messing around with installation of go6 or iputils for ping6 to work without problems.
This experience is another reason I believe that something is very wrong in Foresight that I'll have to solve myself.

Kurumin -- some minor additions.

KuruminNG working very well now on my Dell with KDE 4.1. Operates smoothly and looks great. Honestly, there's very little to complain about.
However, I not really sure how distinctive it is from any other Debian-based distro with KDE4 (other than that the forum for Kurumin is in Portuguese). I haven't had any problems with the Adept package manager, it works fine. Is it any better or worse than Synaptic is hard to say.
Amarok2 is a very nice, thorough and well-matured mediaplayer. I'm impressed.
If I had to cough up some things that are a little annoying, I would suggest these:
i) Can't get Opera icon to stay in the AWN dock
ii) No panel icon available to shutdown/reboot computer. Instead I have to click LogOut icon, which brings me to the LogIn screen from where I can select the Reboot option from the Menu. Unecessarily longwinded, though.
Today I installed:
1) kcheckgmail from Adept. Works flawlessly. I added a symlink to ~/.kde4/Autstart to get it to launch at boot.
2) Installed Skype 2.0.0.72 without problems. To ensure you can be heard when you make calls, you must select Mic as Capture item rather than CD on your sound card. Other than that, just make sure all the playback items are unmuted.
3) Yesterday, I was lamenting the absence of Last.Fm from Amarok2. Well, of course, I was wrong. To enable Last.Fm you go to Settings>>Configure Amarok>>Internet Services and make sure the Last.Fm option is checked. Then double click it which then asks for your username and password. To play Last.Fm, click on the Internet tab on the left and select Last.Fm. What could be simpler?

Amarok2 in KuruminNG

Using this site, I installed Amarok2.
The steps were:
1) Add this to /etc/apt/sources

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main

2) then

sudo apt-get update

3) Now install

sudo apt-get install amarok-nightly

{Of course, could also have done

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install amarok-nightly

}
No launcher has appeared in the Kmenu so I had to launch it from a terminal. Everything seems fine other than:
1) I can't get my collection to build (although everything I've tried plays -- so it's not a codec problem -- I did install codecs from the Magic Icons
2) No Last.Fm seems available

Installed VMwareServer in KuruminNG

VMware Server is available as a Magic Icon and is therefore very easy to install (although you still have to get your own serial number -- however, I have seen before that once you have a serial number you can use the same number over and over for various installs on different computers and different OSes).
Installed fine but couldn't get the VMware icon into the awn dock but it's there on the desktop.
Tried it with Senryu and it worked fine other than I couldn't get it to go to FullScreen. Got this error message:

Unable to find an appropriate host video mode.
Adding the guest mode to the 'display' subsection of the 'screen' section of your /etc/X11/XF86Config and restarting X is likely to help.

Failed to switch to full screen SVGA mode.

I found a solution here and it involves two steps:
1) In VMware Server, go to "View" and select "Autofit window" and "Autofit Guest"
2) In a a terminal

sudo gedit ~/.vmware/preferences

Find the line

pref.autoFitFullScreen = "fitHostToGuest"

and change it to:

pref.autoFitFullScreen = "fitGuestToHost"

and then reboot and everything should be fine.

Installed KDE 4.1 in Kurumin

This time I used this command:

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop

and this installed fine.
Took about 15 mins to download and maybe 5-10 more to install.
KDE 4.1 seems to be working perfectly this time. At least the icons (or more properly "plasmas"show up fine on the desktop.
However, I still not sure how to get file icons on the KDE4 desktop.
Also, the Portuguese accents worked fine from the start without me having to uninstall SCIM. The SCIM icon is set to English/European with the only other option being English Keyboard.
Looking good so far. Check tomorrow to see if I got any surprises.

Kurumin and ssh

Following on from what I mentioned yesterday regarding not being able to open any apps (cannot connect to X server -- error) when Kurumin-Dell as client connected to Ubuntu-mac or Foresight-mac as server.
I thought perhaps this was due to Kurumin using kde 3.5.9 and the server OSes using Gnome.
However, today I tried connecting to Sidux as server (with KDE 3.5.9 and got the very same error (cannot connect to X server).
Did a bit of googling and the trick is to use this command

ssh -X 192.168.x.y app_name

with the -X switch being the one that allows you to overcome the X server problem.
Allows you to connect to Gnome in the server too.

Openssh in KuruminNG

Openssh-server is available in the KuruminNG repos. So I installed it.
Then I ran it with this command

ssh 192.168.1.4

(where the IP was for Ubuntu on the Mac)
This worked fine after I accepted the IP.
However, even though I could see everything on the Mac (e.g using ls at the command prompt), I couldn't get even a single thing to work.
Most gave the error "Can't connect to X server".
This could well be that kurumin works in KDE 3.5.9 while Ubuntu was running with Gnome. So basically, I was trying to open kde stuff in gnome.
I'll have to research if this is totally out of the question.

KuruminNG back to (almost) normal.

I reinstalled KuruminNG a few days ago (without reformatting the /home) but never had a chance to get it set up fully.
Well, I did that today and the main features of this were:

1) To get 1280x1024 screen resolution just add this subsection to the Screen Section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf

SubSection "Display"
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection

2) To get 3D effects
2.1 Install compiz-core, fusion-icon, desktop-effects-kde, emerald
2.2 (In my case) activate accelerated nVidia driver (Sistema>Hardware Drivers)
3) AWN, install from Adept but before you launch install dbus-x11

sudo apt-get install dbus-x11

4) Install latest opera by downloading Ubuntu version as .tgz file. Untar in terminal and then, as root, ./install.sh

Note that Kurumin is still running here with KDE 3.5.9. I expect to get problems when I change it to KDE4.1

Problem with accents (Portuguese) in KDE4

The problem seems to be related to scim in Kurumin anyway.
To overcome the problem, you just have to completely remove scim with this command:

sudo dpkg -P im-switch skim scim-bridge-agent scim-bridge-client-qt scim-modules-socket scim-qtimm libscim8c2a libskim0

Upgraded Kurumin to KDE 4.1

Using this guide, this actually went very smoothly without any problems or errors.
I used the Ubuntu (rather than Kubuntu) commands and didn't bother with the PIM stuff.
KDE4 is a lot more colourful than KDE3.5 but other than that can't say I've seen any huge difference
I probably need a bit more time to get used to KDE 4.

Kurumin exploded but now working again.

I spent quite some time yesterday trying to get Awn-applets (or extras) working in Kurumin. This included adding all the AWN dependencies (for Debian based OSes) from the AWN-Wiki and installing AWN + Extras from Reacocards repo (for Hardy.
Not only did this not work but it also seems to have messed up my Kurumin install. Now after a boot, the keyboard wouldn't work (although it did work in the login page).
I had no option but to re-install.
Tried first without formatting /home but got the same problem once I installed the desktop effects.
So, tried again but this time formatted /home.
Now I remembered one thing I wasn't doing. After the install, the first thing I always do it to do a complete update. In this the vmlinz and initrd.img files are upgraded from 2.6.24-18 to 2.6.24-19.
Now I had been continuing booting (from Ubuntu) to 2.6.24-18. Now I changed /boot/grub/menu.lst in Ubuntu to boot to 2.6.24-19.
Although I don't understand why, nearly everything seemed to now come right. In particular, just adding a very small Display SubSection to /etc/X11/xorg.conf containing no more than this

Modes 1280x1024

and the screen resolution changed to 1280x1024 without me having to go near Configuracoes do Sistema.
I posted about this to the Kurumin forum where more detail is provided.

Script to get 1280x1024 screen resolution in Kurumin

I created this script

#!/bin/bash
xrandr 1280x1024

made it executable and then symbolically linked it to ~/.kde/Autostart
This worked fine in getting Kurumin to boot to a 1280x1024 resolution.

More AWN experimentation in Kurumin

Turns out that only some icons/apps (actually .desktop files) cannot be loaded to the AWN dock but the majority can.
Posted to the AWN forum about this and apparently it´s not an easy problem to resolve. Recommended that I try the standalone launcher which seemingly should allow me to make my own launchers which should then load to the dock.

One problem with AWN as it stands in Kurumin is that there are no applets available.
So, I tried to compile from source but, as usual whenever I´ve tried this, I just kept running into one dependency problem after another. Finally, I gave up when I just couldn get the vte package acknowledged by the ./configure step for the awn-extras.

Maybe the next step is to post to the Kurumin forum to see if anybody has AWN working well.

I also removed the installed AWN and tried to install AWN and the extras from Reacocards repo. The dock installed but it had no working AWN-manager so I couldn´t see if the applets were available or not.
So, looks like I´m not going to have the applets soon. Another thing to mention in my post to the forum although I suspect that userś of this distro are not very eye-candy aware.

AWN almost working in KuruminNG

Noticing that avant-window-navigator failed to launch because of something to do with dbus-launch, I tried to run dbus-launch from a terminal. This advised me to install dbus-x11 which I did.
Then I launched AWN from a terminal and it actually launched.
However, I´m still not able to add any launchers to the dock.
Have to look into this but I´ll bet it´s not that difficult.

Kurumin screen resolution -- CLI to change

I´ve just found that the screen resolution problem I have in Kurumin can be overcome much more easily by just typing

xrandr -s 1280x1024

in a terminal.
You don´t even have to do this as root.
I´m going to make a bash script of this so I can get it to automatically change to a 1280x1024 screen res. on startup.