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XLiveCD: Cygwin and X For Windows On A Live CD
mallumax writes "OSnews is running a story
on XliveCD which runs an X server (from X.org) from the CD using Cygwin. Also included are awk, sed, perl, vim, bash, grep, other text utilities, and most importantly an OpenSSH client. XliveCD is being developed by University Technology Services of Indiana University. Now you can carry Cygwin with you! I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Torrent link."
This is a live CD for X forwarding. The program runs on unix, and has it's graphics forwarded to the X client running on the remote windows machine
- Take a CD to work and use X on any machine with a CD drive
- Use this as a framework to add more applications like dev tools, auditing tools or desktop apps (probably forking the project, but interesting)
- Use it to prove to the ill tempered that *Nix is not all bad and quite usable
- Find a way to port it to Flash drives and such
- Another valid use of BitTorrent
:D (the download of this iso that is)
Remember that this is an early version. The best uses are to come probably.US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I'm sorry if I appear to be to be knit-picking but...
You have the client-server relationship wrong, a common mistake when talking about X windows.
The application running on Unix is the client to the X-server running, in this case, off a Windows machines.
Client examples: xterm, konqueror, Kmail, Evolution running on *nix
Server: X.org running on _Windows_ via Cygwin
--Aaron Greenberg
> What is the point?3 438 of it's ease of use.
The point is easy interoperability between *nix and Windows OSs. See my post at OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=9163#31
You can also find more info from from a paper published for the SIGUCCS of the ACM titled: Easy access to remote graphical UNIX applications for windows users Listed below is the publicly available abstract:
ABSTRACT
A barrier deters Windows users from evaluating graphical scientific software that runs only on remote UNIX systems. Graphical UNIX applications are based on X Windows. To make use of X applications, Windows users must install an X server, install communications software for connecting to remote UNIX systems, and configure their systems to display graphics from remote systems. This barrier can be removed by making use of an X server and communications software that run live from CD-ROM. This poster presents such a CD-ROM known as XLiveCD.
XLiveCD appears to users as an application that provides a command-prompt that allows them to log in to remote computers. Windows XP/NT/ 2000 users insert the CD into a drive and click twice in response to a wizard. A terminal window appears on the screen and provides a command prompt. From the command prompt users run the secure shell (ssh) to connect to a remote computer and launch applications. X graphics windows are forwarded automatically.
XLiveCD is based entirely on open source software and is available free for download. It is a Cygwin environment (from Red Hat, Inc.), including the X.org X server and openssh installed and modified to be run from CD-ROM. The home page is http://xlivecd.indiana.edu/.
I really, really wish the X guys hadn't used this terminology. But they did, so we need to keep it straight.
Just think of it this way:
A file server provides files to its clients. A print server provides printing to its clients. An X Window server provides graphical windows to its clients.
Thus, when you run any X application, it is a client to the X Window server. It asks the server for a window to display stuff in.
So, if you buy an expensive rack-mount server machine, and you hook up a thin client that lets you use a GUI, that thin client has an X server on it, and the X server talks to X clients that run on the server.
The neat thing is that in the other universe (the one where Spock has a beard), they call "clients" "servers" and "servers" "clients", but the X guys still did it backwards there so this confusion still applies.
Hope this helps.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I was going to ask what the point was, given the number of Live CDs such as Knoppix, etc.
Although it's improved with the recent 3.7 release, there are still many, many PC hardware configurations that Knoppix won't run on- and many more where it won't be able to initialize the network device. That's especially common if you have a software modem, a newer WiFi card (like 802.11g), or if you need to use a VPN (even if a Linux client does exist, installing it after booting a livecd would be a pain).
The screen device is also unlikely to be utilized fully. Although Cygwin's X11 server is occasionally very slow, the Knoppix startup will often be unable to use anything better than a generic VESA driver, which can't reach the high resolutions expected from a modern desktop.
Finally, rebooting is awkward and inelegant. Don't go around killing your friends' uptimes just to run a few progs on your home machine.
difference between forwarding X and using VNC isn't that much in my experience.
The difference can be huge. VNC tends to give similar performance over many network speeds, while X11 is more extreme: either much better, or much worse. This is easiest to demonstrate when your network is super-fast. X11 programs on localhost loopback are hard to distinguish from native applications, while VNC imposes a level of sluggishness regardless of the connection speed.
The reverse happens too: when I run Qt apps over a medium speed X11 link, they run fine until I open a pulldown menu- then I get a 45 second wait while it renders the elaborate drop-shadow effect.
I use cygwin in a few different places. One our file server is running NT, put cygwin on there and it like a real server ;)
Also, Since I'm booted into XP most of the time, cygwin fills the nitch of having sshd to copy files back too, perl for running some reports, X for those server admin applications, even vi when I need to do some text work. (Ya, I said vi)
I was running Linux with VMware for XP, but the resources wasted, and no VPN software that worked with our nortel vpn connection, decided to just use cygwin, perfect choice.
Couple things, You can have real RXVT term's without X they run stand alone, and you can customize with normal black backgrounds, right side bars, etc. It also supports Rootless for seemless looking with windows. (Like OSX.) Comes with links, super quick to read heavy text sites, no popup banners, and color/frame support. I use it to read slashdot, and if someone looks over my shoulder, they just see text.
KDE under cygwin runs ok, few bugs, but since I just needed a manager, I went with windowmaker (Or rootless). Save the resources. (Old habits..) Konsole is nice, with tab's, I just with there was a tabbed RXVT then life would be truly sweet. (No tabbed putty yet, come on!)
Cygwin is the first software I install on a new windows system, just makes the whole thing usable. I recommend it to anyone doing work. I dont know how it compares to ActivePerl or others, since I've been using cygwin's for years, havn't had a need to switch.
BTW, a native port of nethack would be nice in the default install... And since I'm making requests, (hint to any Cygwin developers) how about real native selectable for download, icewm, screen and irssi(with ssl). Maybe VNC also. So I can remotely run X software off a Windows box over an ssh tunnel. (Production networks, security, makes an admin work harder..)
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Halliburton, they get no bid contracts, they hire columbian mercs to watch the oil pipelines, and have more armored vechicals than the US Army in IRAQ. Don't join the Army, Join Halliburton!
Most popular unix tools already have windows binaries available, like GNU utilities for Win32 - http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
It's a little outdated but you can easily find newer versions of particular tools you like, also with practical GUI if you'd like. http://www.lexique.org/undows/
Then there's VNC, Putty..
Sample this!
I'm a student at IU, and UITS is not as "fucking sweet" as they sound. In fact, that statement is almost insulting to me.
UITS does bullshit little projects like this all the time, actually, to try and maintain public support. The problem is that they're arrogant and don't meet student and staff needs AT ALL.
Let me give you a couple of examples. Last year, and many years before that, we used an online system called InSite, developed in-house by our comp sci department, to manage grades, webmail, scheduling, everything. It was a little ugly and slightly disorganised, but it was reliable as hell, and I've never heard a single complaint about it.
Then all of a sudden, some asshole bureaucrat at UITS decides we need to spend several million dollars in a contract with PeopleSoft to replace InSite with a new system called, confusingly enough, OneStart. Then everyone realised it didn't do anything academically, so we wasted a bunch more money creating a second system called OnCourse. See where this is going? It's million-dollar software on million-dollar hardware, and guess what, none of it really works that well. And now PeopleSoft is having huge problems of their own. I hope they don't write their own software. Now the Comp Sci department is trying to explain to UITS that they could have re-written and modernised InSite over last summer, for free, using standard software like PHP and SQL running on Solaris. But NO.
UITS also loves doing other stupid things to annoy ordinary users like me. Prime example; this semester they're blowing up pine. I personally love pine. Their justification is that it's 'too expensive to maintain' and that more people use our webmail system. In fact, I get the feeling that most of the stupider people on campus use webmail exclusively, because they've never even heard of IMAP.
Also, our Cisco VPN doesn't work right, and UITS soundly refuses to fix it.
So I called and emailed UITS a dozen times and they never reply, and instead waste their time with little PR projects like this.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
I guess it all depends on what you're using it for. If I have to forward X, it follows that the application I am using is either not my current host or is not available to be done from a vanilla SSH session. Instances of usage include using StarOffice, Mozilla, and even XMMS. There were very legitimate reasons for using each of these applications at the time (well, except XMMS). It is noted that VNC requires fewer roundtrips than X, hence high bandwidth applications appear faster when using VNC despite having to account for an entire desktop environment.
So, no, I'm not kidding. Here's a quote from this article I found while looking for evidence to support my stance, "When using X, I always make sure to turn compression on with the -C option (Compression yes in the config file), as X is bandwidth intensive, to put it politely. With compression on and a fast cipher such as blowfish (the default for recent versions of OpenSSH), Netscape is just about usable over a ten-megabit network. Without compression, it is rather painful, and I would certainly recommend against running any complex X application over less then ten megabits."
This has been my experience.
Are you kidding? I used to run xterm and Emacs over 2400 baud and it was tolerable,
Your example is inconclusive. Network speed has two independent components: bandwidth and latency. Just because your modem had poor bandwidth doesn't mean the latency was also bad.
And indeed, many aspects of the X11 protocol involve almost gratuitous round-trip queries that can make high latency a killer. Often it's aspects of the GUI toolkits that create this problem- a pretty effect that seems cool & fast on a localbox can be sluggish on the network.
Specific real-life example: in Evolution, you move an email from one folder to another, and the application draws a little translucent icon flying from origin to destination as a feedback indicator. It covers about 200 pixels distance, and for each step, the applcation downloads the remote image of the workspace under that position, alpha-blends a pixmap ontop of it, and sends the pixmap back to the viewer.
On a long-haul link, this can take MINUTES, during which you can't interact with any X11 programs. If you were running the program under VNC, however, the whole animation would be over before a screen update is even transmitted. While the user has missed-out on some eye-candy, this is far better than waiting through all the bidirectional traffic.
On the other hand, TightVNC is not usable for serious work even over a cable modem.
For truely serious work, it's not usable even on a loopback interface to localhost.
Even if everything else was the same, VNC has to refresh the whole screen,
False. VNC is an extensible protocol, so it can support arbitrarily intelligent update mechanisms. But even the original generation of VNC clients were smart enough only to update the screen regions that were actually changing.
(If your VNC experience has primarily been with the Windows server, you might not have noticed this, but that's because it was difficult for them to interface with the server without full screen-scraping and mouse-yanking, as Windows wasn't designed to allow concurrent users)
And before you ask, no, I did *not* need to install any non-free software on this box to get a NX server going. Gentoo's Portage has currently FreeNX 0.2.4, and 0.2.7 is available from bugs.gentoo.org. The rest of what you need for NXx serving was opensource from the start.
Oh, and by the way, I love the way NX causes further confusion regarding the question of what's a client and what's a server. In the case of FreeNX: You use nxclient to connect to an ssh server, where nxserver is the login shell of the user "nx" (as which you authenticate yourself first). nxserver starts the servers it needs, and the client applications connect to the X server on the client through the servers started by nxserver, which are clients to the nxproxy on the client :).
I remember cursing and swearing when IU signed a deal with Bill & Co for something like $6m/year to get site wide licenses for 45k students + 15k admin/faculty. The license covered Win+Office and UTS had to do all the cd replication and all the support. I wish I could get $6m for handing somebody two cd's to copy and walking away.
Now the irony follows: given that UTS has worked toward cultivating an OS monoculture they are providing the path to allow multi-culture support.
I suppose this is easier for them to police than a bunch of students running around with Knoppix/Gnoppix CD's.
DSL, Damn Small Linux embedded will let you run Linux in a window with X Server, SSH, VNC, Mozilla Firefox, Dillo, a texteditor, vi.....you name it. It all fits nicely on a 128 MB USB key. Oh and it's based on everyone's favorite live CD, Knoppix.
Gorkman
While nice, be aware you can likely run putty off of a floppy or even a CD. Nothing installed (oh unless they county registry keys!....).
Gorkman
Yes, but use X to do WHAT exactly? Click on pretty buttons over and over again? If I can't have cygwin on disk, able to manipulate files, save scripts, etc, what's the use, really? The few Unix apps that are worth the trouble of running in an X11 window on a Windows box, already have native ports.
The debugger that came with our version HP/UX server did not have a console interface; it was GUI only. That means we had to have X to log in an do any debugging work on our apps.
I could have used something like this.
I already run Cygwin on a flash drive. Granted, I only run some BASH, CVS, Lynx, clisp, and some other text utilities. But it only takes up 69,884,685 bytes plus slack. Here's what I did:
Hope someone finds that useful! Some resources that really helped me out include:
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
XLiveCD does gives the option to install. I haven't tried this personally, but I did mention to other writers that they could simply mount the ISO using something like DaemonTools, negating the need for a physical CD and drive.
Using "ssh -Y" to connect to an account negates any problems with setting DISPLAY, etc. It really is damn simply, leaving me more time to write. It's sweet; kudos to the people to came up with this.
P.