# eXceed / eXodus / etc

## Varsuuk

Back in the day, I used to use a piece of software called eXodus (think White Pine Software?) that gave me a nice XWindows login to my linux server.

I recall it being setup to use XDM and gave me a 'duplicate' desktop login on my windows (at the time 9 :Cool:  box.

I used it for quite some time after it was stale and X versions moved on.

After that I recall using exceed time to time - but for whatever reason I usually hap problems setting it up and getting it to work properly - though I was able to duplicate exodus features eventually in one incarnation.

My gentoo server is also a dev box but it is awkward for me to type at it and I hate limiting myself to xterms. I'd love to be able to work on it via some remote X or the like.

Any tips on open source software for this or if not, at least a good not too expensive win (xp) app for this?

Thanks!

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## Hu

You could run an instance of Xvnc on the Gentoo machine and connect to it with a Windows-hosted VNC viewer.  This will not let you mix X11 windows freely with your desktop like Exceed did, but it will let you run arbitrary X11 applications and see them from your Windows desktop.  You need to emerge a VNC package on the Gentoo system.  I prefer net-misc/vnc with USE=server, but others may be available as well.  You also need a VNC viewer for Windows.  Several are available at no cost, but I have not looked at them in a long time.  Since VNC is a standard protocol, any of the compliant viewers should work.

If you need to encrypt the connection, you can set up PuTTY on Windows to forward a port between the VNC server running on Gentoo and your local system, then connect the Windows-hosted VNC viewer to the forwarded port.

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## Varsuuk

Great - I will check this out once I finish reinstalling gentoo - finally got my apache proxying back as it used to be.

The main thing is I want to see the desktop of my other pc as if I was at it - however my xp box has a much larger display with higher res, so I'd hope that the X session can use those values (would be a nice bennie)

I am not sure what mixing X11 apps with my desktop means - I used to use eXodus/exceed simply to forward the server's X display I never really cared about the underlying windows session on my desktop.

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## slackline

A good open source alternative to eXceed is to use Cygwin/X on a windows machine.

I used to get colleagues at work to do this when they wanted access to my server, and its works perfectly.

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## Varsuuk

One thing though - I thought I once tried to get this and reading the docs it seemed this was meant to EXPORT your progs to other boxes not to view the desktop of another gentoo server.

Basically that is my goal to use my XP box to display the full Gentoo KDE desktop environment and to run programs as if I was typing on the gentoo box's keyboard and viewing it's monitor.

If an app lets me do that - Im all there!  But I would prefer not to put in some 'virtual' unix system on my XP - I don't want to run unix on my xp - just use the xp as a graphic terminal.

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## Hu

A Cygwin X server will let you run the X11 applications on the Gentoo machine and render them as individual windows on your Windows XP system.  Using Xvnc will let you run a full desktop environment on the Gentoo machine, and have one very big window on your Windows system, in which all the X11 applications are drawn.

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## slackline

Well you could simply connect over SSH via Cgywin/X with X-forwarding enabled and have a whole X environment forwarded to give you a whole desktop as opposed to individual windows.  I used to advise colleagues at work of how to do this, and have some notes somewhere, I'll look them up and post them if I find them.

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## slackline

Right, I've had a quick trawl through the Cygwin/X documentation and the Chapter 4. Using Cygwin/X has info on getting it working with Window Managers.

It states that you can launch a remote window manager over an ssh tunnel (see section on Secure ssh), thus you can get a remote desktop using Cygwin/X as opposed to individual windows for each app as described above.  This also avoids the hassle of having to set up and configure a VPN (which I suspect you might have to do if using VPNC?, but don't know since I've never tried this).

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## Hu

You misread my post.  I said VNC, which stands for Virtual Network Computing.  This is completely unrelated to VPNC, an unfortunately named open source client for the Cisco VPN.

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## slackline

 *Hu wrote:*   

> You misread my post.  I said VNC, which stands for Virtual Network Computing.  This is completely unrelated to VPNC, an unfortunately named open source client for the Cisco VPN.

 

Apologies, your right I did misread it.

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## tuxmin

emerge nxserver-freenx on your Gentoo box and install the NX-Client for your

Windows machine (find it here: http://www.nomachine.com/download-client-windows.php).

NX supports[/bug] suspending sessions and gives you a much better performance compared to

VNC -- especially over slow WAN connections.

alex

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