On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 9:13 PM, Dr. Ed Morbius <dredmorb...@gmail.com>wrote:
> on 20:51 Wed 16 Feb, D G Teed (donald.t...@gmail.com) wrote: > > Having lost KDE 3.5 in the squeeze update, and not being satisfied with > the > > new KDE 4.* (frankly, I think it is very poorly designed), I am looking > for > > a desktop > > which can stack running terminal sessions. > > > > Let's say I have 50 Konsole or gnome-terminal windows open, each to a > > different remote box. I want to click on the panel area and select one > by > > name which is already open. I could do that in KDE 3.5. Firefox and > other > > apps could do this too. How is this done in gnome or what options are > there > > for managing many open sessions of something? > > For simply managing windows, I find WindowMaker vastly superior to KDE, > GNOME, or XFCE4. There's a window list by default (middle-mouse on > desktop, or <F11>). This is pinnable, and it's pretty easy to select > and walk through a set of windows quickly (though you can't, say, > text-search through a list of names, which would be sort of cool). > > http://main.linuxfocus.org/~georges.t/menu.html > > You might even find a "mouseless" tiling/tabing WM (e.g.: ionwm) to be > useful in this context. You can designate sections of your desktop to > specific apps, and stack up multiple instances of an app in one spot. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(window_manager) > > Sadly, development on numerous good but older WMs has stagnated (ion's > in stasis since late 2009, WindowMaker's last upstream commits were in > 2005). > > I'd also suggest you look at your workflow if it requires you to keep 50 > open remote shell sessions: > > - Generally: scripting remote interactions. > - Use 'dsh' or other tools to run similar commands on multiple > systems. > - Manage systems via puppet, monit, etc., rather than interactively. > - Use the KDE Terminal / GNOME Terminal built-in multiplexing > features. > - Use another terminal multiplexer such as screen or tmux. > > > What are you doing that requires 50 terminal sessions? How do you plan > on managing this when your server count doubles? Increases by an order > of magnitude? > > This is at a University, so each system is pretty much unique in purpose, packages, etc. There are for example roughly 10 Solaris Sparc. One is financial system, another library management, another an Oracle DB, another the student system, etc. Most others are Linux. Two of those are cyrus mail servers, another two are MX, then one moodle system, 5 different systems for Computer Science, one for icecast streaming, lon-capa, and many specialized boxes, some for research grants, etc. There are not really more than 2 of the same thing except when you get into the Math Cluster, and usually I work on only one system from the cluster. Anyway, this may be partially misunderstood. I'm not looking for a solution to manage the remote systems. I'm not doing something on all 50 terminals at once. But over the course of a few days, I end up having up to 50 terminals open from work recently done, and it makes sense to use the terminal sessions again. I merely want to pick one terminal session that is already open to the system I want to work on, if it exists. Likewise to pick from one of my web browser windows from a stack of open windows. Thus, the stacking in KDE 3.5's kicker was just the thing. --Donald
