I've been long fan of NX nomachine for remote desktop, which worked just fine until some time ago.
Recently I have all the time problems with ALT and CAPSLOCK synchronization, and since I am programming under remote X with vim it starts to drive me crazy. I spent more time figuring out what I accidentally deleted, where I've made typo etc than moving forward.
I figured out that the problem appears only when I have lag of > 20ms to the server.
I use ssh tunnel but that's not the problem.
What are other alternatives to NX which do work for you?
btw, i am working with 3.4.0-8 NX under Mac and I connect to Linux machine.
Here is the unresolved bug report.
Greetings.
Why not just use ssh's X11 compression instead of NX? Enable X11 in the remote host's sshd, and do ssh -YC user#remote-host.
Besides, vi/vim is the only editor that can be used on very slow links with long delays. '8j' is much more reliable than pressing the up-arrow key 8 times under such conditions.
Starting out X11 under Mac before starting the NX client reduces this problem in a way which makes it possible to work.
You may want to try xpra, it has a switch for high latency links which prevents keys from getting stuck at the cost of not maintaining an always consistent keyboards state: xpra --no-keyboard-sync.
Unlike NX, it does not require an X11 server at the client end and will run natively in OSX.
Related
I'm developing WPF textual testing application.
Everything is OK, but sometimes my app stops responding.
Using Process Explorer I've found out that there's a problem in wpfgfx_0400.dll. Moreover, in most of cases entire OS could stop responding after a while. I think it could be video layer (driver?) issue, because music continue playing.
All windows/.net/video driver updates are installed. Windows7x64, .NET4.0, Radeon HD7700
What could be the problem?
From my experience, such errors are almost always a driver issue. You can try to verify that this is hardware/driver related problem by forcing wpf to software render mode - see this answer and this answer for more info on how to do it. If you don't have any problems in software mode then it's a driver issue, so you can try some older driver versions and see if it goes away.
I asked this question in the Raspberry PI section, so please forgive me for posting this here again. Its just there doesn't seem to be as active as this section of the forum. So, onto my question...
I have an idea and I'm working on it right now. I just wanted to see what the community's thought was on using a screensaver as digital signage. Every tutorial I've read shows someone using chromium in kiosk mode, and while that's fine and works well for some uses, it doesn't work for what I need. I have successfully completed a chromium kiosk, and it was cool. But the signage that I need to create now, has to work without internet. I've thought about installing LAMP locally on the PI, and still using chromium. I still may have to if this idea doesn't pan out. All I need from the signage is a Title Message in the top center, and a message body underneath it, with roughly 300-400 character limit. My idea is to write a screensaver module, in C, that will work with a screensaver such as xscreensaver. The module would need to be able to load messages from a directory on the pi. Then for my clients to update their signage text, I would write a simple client that sent commands as well as the text via SSH to the pi. I want to know what other people think about this. Is it a good idea? Bad idea? Should I "waste" my time doing something like this?
Thanks in advance.
I am already using a rPi as digital signage, just over a year. I am using two different setups:
version 1 uses Raspian loading xdesktop and qiv image viewer to cycle images stored on the Pi itself, synchronized with a remote server. The problem I found was power and SD stability, when the power fails, which it will do no matter what, just when... The Sd card can become corrupt due to all the writing that Raspian does all the time. Certainly does not really need to write to SD.
version 2 uses a RO-filesystem and a command line image tool. Uses the same process to show images from local, and sync with server. But power fail causes no ill effects.
I am not using screensaver to display images, that seemed redundant to me, and unnecessary to wait for the SS to start just to display the images.
Some of the images are created using imagemagik, which is nicely dynamic where needed.
I'm currently working an a rather large web project which is written using C servlets ( utilizing GWAN Web server ). In the past I've used a couple of IDEs for my LAMP/PHP jobs, like Eclipse.
My problems with Eclipse are that you can either mirror the project locally, which isn't possible in this case as I'm working on a Mac (server does not run on OSX), or use the "remote" view, which would re-upload files when you save them.
In the later case, the file is only partly written while uploading, which makes this a no-go for a running web server, or the file could become corrupted if the connection was lost during uploading. Also, for changing some character, uploading the whole file seems rather inefficient to me.
So I was thinking:
Wouldn't it be possible to have the IDE open Vim per SSH and mirror my changes there, and then just :w (save) ? Or use some kind of diff-files for changes?
The first one would be preffered, as it has the added advantage of Vim .swp files, which makes it possible that others know when someone is already editing the file.
My current solution is using ssh+vim, but then I lose all the cool features I have with Eclipse and other more advanced IDEs.
Also, regarding X-Forwarding: The reason I don't like it is speed. It feels way slower than just editing locally, and takes up unneeded bandwidth, when all I want to do is basically "text editing".
P.S.: I couldn't find any more appropriate tags for the question, especially no "remote" tag, but if you know any, feel free to add them. Also, if there is another similar question, feel free to point it out - I couldn't find any.
Thank you very much.
If you're concerned about having to transmit the entire file for minor changes, the only solution that comes to my mind is running (either continuously, or on demand) an rsync job that mirrors the remote site to your local system (and back). The rsync protocol just transmits the delta information. According to Are rsync operations atomic at file level?, the change is atomic.
Another possibility: run everything in a virtual machine on your Mac. The server and the IDE/text editor are both on the same virtual machine so you don't have to fear network issues.
Because the source code on the virtual machine is under some kind of VCS the classic code → test → commit process is trivial (at least theoretically).
We have a higher-end Win7-64 Dell precision workstation notebook with an i7, 8 gigs of ram, tons of hd space and running dedicated AMD graphics. The machine is about a month old. It was one of the highest-end we could get at the time.
What we're experiencing is when we run our WPF/SQL Server (local) app, it tends to hang and stall, sometimes completely crashing, but mostly just hanging until we force it to close. However, the exact same installer running in a VMware virtual machine running on that same machine runs flawlessly. Actually, the VM install runs better than a lot of native installs on other machines. It's very snappy with no hangs or hesitations at all. But again, same app, same installer running direct in the OS, and we're back to the issues above.
We've ran all Windows updates.... we've tried completely reinstalling everything... .NET frameworks, SQL Server, video drivers, even updated the BIOS and checked for rogue services but it still happens.
At first we thought it was Symantec AV's real-time protection because when we first shut that off, things started getting snappy again (and slowed down and froze when it auto-re-enabled itself furthering this hypothesis) but then it just started slowing down again, and more surprising, that same AV is running in the VM without issue! Checked the exceptions but there weren't any.
We even tried forcing WPF to run in software-render mode but again, nothing.
Now the odd thing is this only seems to be happening on this and a few other machines, but we can't seem to find anything in common except they're all running Win7 64-bit. As such, we have absolutely no idea where to start. And since most are hangs, not crashes, we can't even look at the crash reports.
So can anyone give us any idea what else we can look at? This is holding up us shipping a three-years-in-the-making major release of our software so to say this is a show-stopper would be an understatement. We've been stumped for about a month now and getting nowhere fast.
Found it!! Turns out there's a bug in .NET 4.0 regarding UI Automation and the changes MS introduced. Here's the info, and the fix! (Note: Even if you call MS, they will send you a link, but it's always a broken link. I managed to track this down manually.)
Note: Their article talks about a specific case that causes this behavior, but if you google around, you'll see tons of issues around hangs related to those DLLs. The latest is they're promising a fix in the .NET 4.5 runtime (from a MS post on this issue.)
Here's the KB article...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2484841/en-us
...and here is the actual hotfix.
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/KB2484841/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=5583
Apparently the VM didn't suffer from this. We weren't sure if the VM had the hotfix applied or not or if this only happens on non-virtualized machines. Still, this solved all of the issues and the app is now snappy again. (Man, was this fun to track down! Ugh!!)
How exactly would one go about getting an OpenGL app to run fullscreen straight from the terminal (Ubuntu Server 9.04)? I've developed an application for visual diagnostics on my server, but, I'm not totally sure the best way to get it to run in a windowless environment.
Ideally, I would run my program:
./visualdiagnostics
and have that launch the OpenGL app. Then, via a simple Ctrl+X key binding, I'll kill the app and go back to the terminal.
Do I need to install X11 and then somehow launch it from within the program? What would be the best way to detect if it's already running and, start/stop it if necessary?
And FYI: No, I'm not trying to get this to run over Putty or anything... I have a monitor hooked straight up to the server. The server has proper video drivers installed.
There are several parts to your task. Keep in mind that some of this can be very distro-specific; but since you said Ubuntu we'll talk Ubuntu!
Also you tagged this question C however I am starting off with a common Linux pattern: a native application with a Bash shell script wrapper. Perhaps once you get things working well you might fold that functionality into C if you have to.
Detecting whether X is running
Being root can help a lot. Some things that work.
pgrep Xorg
Check whether /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth exists. This will be there even if nobody has logged in but GDM is running.
ls -l /home/*/.Xauthority (Even if you're not root you can at least confirm whether you are running X.
Piggybacking an existing X session
You did not specifically mention it but if you are root at the console, or if you want to run the app as the same user who is already logged in, it's pretty easy.
You have to get the DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY environment variables right, and once you do you can use the existing X display.
For DISPLAY you might just assume :0 or you could find an existing X program (x-session-manager is the GNOME standard) and read its environment from /proc/PID/environ. Variables are in key=value format delimited by a null byte. For example, if its PID is 12345:
cat /proc/12345/environ \
| ruby -ne 'puts $_.split("\0").select {|e| e.starts_with? "DISPLAY=" }'
For XAUTHORITY you could get it the same way. Or if you prefer guessing, it's almost always /home/whoever/.Xauthority
Once you have those two variables, running X code is easy, for example:
env DISPLAY=:0 XAUTHORITY=/home/brian/.Xauthority ./visualdiagnostics
Stopping X
This one is easy if you're root: /etc/init.d/gdm stop. killall Xorg will work too.
If you are a user, kill your own Xorg or x-session-manager process. (I'd welcome input from others for the canonical way to do this. Maybe some dbus-send message?)
Starting X
I would recommend xinit whose goal in life is to fire X and run exactly one program.
For example: xinit ./visualdiagnostics
You can also tell xinit what resolution to run X at which may or may not be important to you. (This becomes important in the full-screen section below.)
The problem with this is you will have no window manager— no maximize and minimize buttons. It's not just cosmetic. Usually an app is useless because a popup window cannot be moved or you cannot focus on the right input field. However if you have a special app it could be sufficient (see full-screen below).
The next step would be my answer to everything: another shell script wrapper! Something simple that starts the window manager and then becomes your program should work.
#!/bin/bash
#
# Start visualdiagnostics once xinit calls me.
/usr/bin/metacity& # Or ratpoison, or fluxbox, or compiz, etc.
exec ./visualdiagnostics
It's important to exec (become) the main program because once that first program exits, X will shut down.
Running fullscreen
I am not 100% certain on this. Some ideas:
Try the standard X -geometry parameters to set 0,0 as the upper-left corner and +x+y for your horizontal and vertical size. How do you know the size? Either you hard-coded it when you launched xinit or you could ask the X server. xwininfo -root will tell you and there is an xlib API call that would do that too—check the xwininfo source I guess.
Your app itself can request maximization and/or resizing to fill the screen. I'm not familiar but it is definitely in the X API.
Some of the more configurable window managers can be pre-configured to run you maximized already. This is probably what I personally would check first. Your wrapper script could create a $HOME/.fluxboxrc just by echoing some hard-coded configs > the file.
Summary
The others are right. X is not strictly necessary sine OpenGL can run against a framebuffer. However considering how ubiquitous X is and how much work has gone into automating it for distributions, I would probably invest my effort into the X route as it might be easier long-term even though it's a little convoluted.
(By the way, I sincerely hope when you say "terminal" you mean you are at the text console, not gnome-terminal that would be awful! :)
Well I am clearly not sure my answer might help you out.
Long ago when I was student, I manage to do so (launching an openGL app from a terminal only linux installation) by installing frame buffer. As long as I remember I needed to recompile my kernel (as framebuffer was/is a kernel module).
This was maybe 5 years ago on a debian distrib, and I don't know how does it work now for up-to-date debian distrib as Ubuntu. Maybe framebuffer is compiled statically in the binary kernel provided by default with Ubuntu. May be not. Maybe framebuffer is irrelevant now... Or I may be totally wrong and not remembering every details of my own adventure 5 years ago now ..
Have a look on Google ! ;-)
Hope it will help...
**
Update:
**
What is frame buffer ?
How to install it? Here or there
As yves pointed out, you can avoid running the X server if you use the framebuffer. Actually, the framebuffer modules are often yet available (for example, they are used to have the tux logo during the kernel start or a text terminal with fancy images in the background), this anyway depends on the distribution and the settings you are using.
The kernel side is quite primitive so I'd suggest to use some higher level library such as DirectFB. The framebuffer is usable without problems but don't expect the same maturity level than a full blown X server.
Are you trying to have the video be on the monitor connected directly to the computer?
Is X running on the server?
If X is running, you can do
export DISPLAY=:0.0
which tells X apps to connect to the X server at localhost, rather than where' you're coming from.
If you're actually logging in locally (from a direct terminal) ... yes, you need X installed and running.