Samuel Hunt wrote:
Thought for you all.....
Would it be possible to use Wine with a few extra bits to make a kind
of Windows Terminal Server?
So you login via VNC, and the Wine system prompts you for a username
and password, which it authenticates. It then loads up a "desktop",
with a fake "Start" menu, that you have things similar to a normal
start menu, but more appropriate to a terminal server environment.
You then run your programs, but all the I/O is to/from the remote
client, and each session is independent of each other, so there can be
lots of different clients with different permissions (so admin may
have full access to all of the drive, but users have various bits of
their "hard drive" read-only and things like that).
Would seem to make Wine very useful if that could be done. Then VNC
clients simply see a "Windows" desktop, and can do what they want, but
all the back-end is Wine and Linux.
Sam
I have done something similar but with the X11 protocol.
The client user browses to a web site (somewhere on the LAN). He than
gets a Menu of applications /Sessions he can use. If these clients are
Linux than no problem an ssh-X session is initiated to open that
application. ( We used a load balanced collection of servers). If it was
a Windows Client than first time comers get an OCX installed that in
turn installs XMing X-Server and plink. Once installed, the web page
will initiate the same ssh-X session as before. We chose remote
application to run as Native apps so there is no distinction between
locally running or remote applications. But a desktop mode can be used
as well.
One thing to watch out is that: Currently, wine does not support
multiple X connections on the same WineServer. What I did is use the ssh
connection environment variables and set up a quick on-the-fly wine
$WINEPREFIX folder for each new session. This gave me a nice Cytrix like
control over what gets saved during a session. (Which was nothing in our
case)
Remoting is nothing new to Linux, and VNC could work Just as well. Wine
is just a regular X-client application. Anything that applies to a Linux
application also applies to a Wine application running under Wine.
Free Life
Boaz
