Notices

I can get fullscreen in KDE, but I can't seem to get any non-Hildon apps to go fullscreen on the Hildon desktop.

One of the coolest things about this method is that the clipboard (cut, copy and paste) works well between Word and the other apps running.

If anything is brittle, it is Word running under Wine. Just for the heck of it, I tried pasting a URL from MicroB into the "Insert Picture from File" dialogue box. Boom, huge crash.

wmctrl(1)

Wow. That wmctrl (and kciconsbox) is some serious coolness, especially for guys like me who insist on running non-Hildon apps all the time! And yes, forwarded windows (including Word) show up in the window list, and they can be fullscreened.

I just had exactly what you were wondering about -- I lost connection for a bit. My forwarded "gedit" window didn't refresh for a while, then Hildon said the window wasn't responding, so I hit cancel and waited. Sure enough, it responded and things went back to normal...

Is it possible to do what you did, Qole, with a Windows Desktop? I mean, is there any way to access remotely Windows apps?

Sorry, alephito, not like I show. You need Linux to get Windows apps to work over the Internet. Yeah. That's ironic, isn't it.

You can use VNC to remotely control your Windows desktop, but it isn't really the same.

I am currently using VNC but it is far from your beautiful integration.

Thanks, anyway.

You can actually do things the other way around, that is, get a remote Word running on your Windows desktop, using Cygwin and SSH. But you still need to get Word running under Linux to do that.

The fundamental problem is that Windows was never designed to work over a network. Networking was something they added on, as an afterthought. The Linux display model, however, was inherited from Unix, and it was designed to run over a network right from the beginning. It was actually assumed you would be running your display over a network. The server would be in some closet somewhere, and your desktop machine would simply be an input-output box. Technology caught up, and now the server and the client are almost always on the same machine, but all the infrastructure is still there for making it work, and making it work well. The cool thing about the tablet is that it can act as a hand-held network application server, too!

I think I will take one of my old PCs from my 'junk cemetery' (because of Windows upgrades) and start playing with Linux.

Do you recommend me to start using Ubuntu or any other distribution?

The benefit Ubuntu has is a wide userbase (so if you have problems you can usually find the solution on Google or on ubuntuforums). And I find it's a pretty good distribution (though I haven't tried many kinds.. have a Fedora 9 disc that I just downloaded so I have to try that).

I'm doing all of this using Ubuntu Dapper on a Pentium III 900. It sits in my basement, inside an old arcade game box, and it just works.


My Linux server