Shai Dorsai!

[mdlbear]

In this case, of course, Dorsai is the computer in the bedroom. (This being thestarport.org, all the machines are named after places that could plausibly have starports. The machines that are used for recording and editing music are, naturally, places mentioned in filksongs: the laptop is Argo, and the other workstation is Harmony.) Anyway, it works: I'm posting from it.

The little rolling desk isn't terribly solid, and because it overlaps the bookshelves on the left there isn't room for anything but my Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard. Which is pretty good, and has pointing devices that there otherwise wouldn't be room for, but it's not a Model M.

In addition, it's running Ubuntu Studio instead of Etch; not all my usual fonts are installed (so windows come out the wrong size and don't quite fit properly), (added 02-24: the font problem turned out to be a bad line in .Xdefaults) and it's running Emacs 22.1. I'm not quite ready to make the transition to the new Gnus. OTOH it's fast as a bat. I'd forgotten just how fast it is...

There are still a few piles of stuff scattered around the bedroom that were pulled out of the corner, and the chair isn't particularly comfortable. The recording rig hasn't been reconfigured yet; I'm not sure where the microphones and preamps belong, and there are no monitor speakers (so, basically, I don't have sound on this machine yet).

But, Colleen really likes having me in the bedroom with her, even though she can't see me from where she's sitting. And it does feel comfortable. Moving back and forth between the two systems is slightly painful: I have to kill the browser, and move my IM presence. Not a full solution. It'll take me a while to make the transition smooth; it will probably involve switching to Ubuntu or Lenny on all the clients.

Comments

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

http://partiwm.org/wiki/xpra might be useful to you.

http://nomachine.com/ might also -- it's commercial, but a GPLed NX server is available at http://freenx.berlios.de/.

To abuse a marketing quote from Sun (originally uttered by John Gage), "The Network is the Computer". You have servers, why shouldn't you be able to access the services provided by those servers whenever and whereever you want? :)

[mdlbear]

xpra looks as though it could be useful if it ever gets real - right now it doesn't appear to be in a usable state.

Simply running apps on a server -- which I was doing years ago and abandoned -- doesn't give acceptable performance, especially for high-performance audio. Even multitrack recording to an NFS-mounted Audacity project is marginal. Plus there's the fact that I'm not about to run, or even install, a full suite of desktop applications on my file server.

Remote operation could conceivably work for Firefox and Pidgin, which are the only two apps I commonly use where having multiple instances running on different machines causes problems. But only if the audio problem could be solved.

For now it's easier just to write a script that goes over to the other machine and kills the problem apps before restarting them locally. An alternative for IM would be to use finch under screen. Or there might be something I can do with a proxy; I haven't researched that. Firefox remains a problem, since I don't want the hassle of maintaining and synchronizing multiple profiles.

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

It was for Firefox and Pidgin that I was suggesting xpra, not for the audio workstation apps. You'd stated that the web browser and the IM re-homing were the two largest stumbling blocks that you had. (I was thinking you could perhaps run them on your computer in your office, and bring their displays to your bedroom computer.)

The audio issue, though, is more workstation-design than anything software. I know that I don't have monitor speakers; instead I have headphones on a device with a switchable zero-latency playthru. This may or may not work for you.

[mdlbear]

Right -- I'll try xpra if it ever becomes usable, and if it can redirect sound. Pidgin has sounds, of course, and Firefox not only has sound itself but can run helper apps that have sound. It's a big problem, and the simple solution will work for now.

Monitor speakers for the bedroom are definitely on the list; headphones I have. There are also problems with which soundcard is device 0. More config hassles.

[(Anonymous)]

xpra is *usable*, in a minimal sort of way. I.e., it has a user, i.e., me. So there's definite roughness (and I need to make another release with a workaround for the X server bug that someone reported), but one can accomplish useful, not-hacking-on-xpra things with it.

Audio forwarding is trickier. One problem is capturing the audio in the first place -- there really isn't any reasonable, standard way to do this on Linux ATM. Hopefully PulseAudio will take over the world and solve that problem. (Alternatively, PulseAudio has its own audio-forwarding mechanism that you might use in tandem with a tool like xpra.) The other problem is maintaining audio/video sync when both are going over the network with its unpredictable latencies... hmm, maybe that's doable, would have to experiment.

Anyway, if you do try xpra, I'd love to hear how it goes, whether bad or good...

-- Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com>

[mdlbear]

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, due to the current sorry state of Linux audio, it will probably be a year or so before it'll do me much good, but it might be worth a try.

[webmaven.livejournal.com]

"Which is pretty good, and has pointing devices that there otherwise wouldn't be room for, but it's not a Model M."

I guess that in this particular context this won't be useful, but for future reference you can get what are essentially Model-M keyboards with built-in pointing devices from Unicomp. Look at the Endurapro and On-the-Ball models (pointing stick and trackball, respectively).

[mdlbear]

I know. I have one of the originals, but I actually prefer a trackball over either of the keyboard-based options. Unicomp makes a compact version, too, but it's not as good as the Lenovo for key feel.