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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."
Doesn't running this on Windows defeat the purpose of it existing? Unix... On windows... Does not compute... Can't stop... ... ... Help...
What is the point?
Free Firefox news reader.
I was going to ask what the point was, given the number of Live CDs such as Knoppix, etc. Then I actually RTFA and they suggest it's for use in public access Windows boxes, where a reboot may not be available but running stuff from the CD is.
I still suspect VNC on a USB key or CD might be easier, and the difference between forwarding X and using VNC isn't that much in my experience.
The reality is a little less exciting - just a program you can run from a CD. (yawn).
Do they also include coLinux on the CD? Being able to run Linux from a LiveCD directly onder windows would be a really nice feature me thinks.
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!
Now you can carry Cygwin with you! I have been looking for something like this for a long time.
:rolleyes:
:shaking fist at slashgods:
You have been looking for a long time? I have been carrying around a flash card with ssh keys, Putty, a fat installation of Cygwin with every tool you oodled over, along with ethreal and various other network tools for like 2 years. I also have a backup of all this stored in a subdirectory on my iPod.
This is like something a Wired! subscriber would get excited about: A distribution of win32 tools where all you have to do is put the CD in the thingy and press "I agree".
How about more headlines on Cygwin when there are major updates? If it were up to me, any time good projects like Linux from Scratch get updated, I would make that a headline. The way I see it, we want to attract the people who actually think to threads, and not the perpetual computer noobies who give up when "that thing they clicked on did not go the first time around".
Just downloaded it. This CD is great! The "insert and go" character of the CD makes it very useful.
.ssh directory should not be placed on the desktop! :)
Only one comment: the
.sig: No such file or directory
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.
You can hack out cygwin quite effectively - don't forget the registry keys need to be deleted and all cygwin1.dll have to go. You can find info on the website, and you may get help on the list depending upon how mean everyone is feeling and how you ask :-)
You have the spelling wrong, a common mistake when talking about X Window.
now please correct my grammar ;)
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 :).
This is actually a very nice thing to have, it writes no permanent files to the HD, no need to reboot, and you have the ability to run your X apps where ever you are, over a single port to no less.
That means I can use *my* browser, with all of my short cuts and plugins (or lack there of) and I only have to keep one configured instead of the current three that I do now. Also you get to use all of your own apps, configured the way you like them. And because it is all done securely, on your own machine, surf for what ever you want "Harold down the hall was caught surfing for porn, inspect his machine" "I don't know what they saw, but only thing on ther was mens boxer pictures from WalMart's website." Actually the more I think about it this is a great privacy tool that can be easily handed out.
Light, responsive and it allows you to bring even non-ported F/OSS programs to a Windows desktop. I realy don't see what there is to be down on this about. Congrats to the people developing it.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
FTA:
The software runs from the CD without being installed
and a few lines down:
The wizard presents a menu of reading documentation, running the X Server from the CD and installing the software to the hard drive
So, does it run completely from cd or not? If it really needs to install stuff to the harddisk it could form a problem in work environments where users might not have write access to the harddisk.
I currently work for an organization that has very strict (and government controlled) policies in place for the installation and use of software packages. It's called bureaucracy. To install PuTTy on my XP workstation I must submit a ticket via our Management System interface. That ticket must then be assigned to my manager for an approval for the request of the software. Once my manager approves (could be a week or more) the ticket is then assigned to a senior manager for approval. Once that senior manager approves the installation of the software the ticket is assigned to an auditor to evaluate the financial impact on the company, the auditor must then write up a RFP (Request for Purchase) and submit approval to the ticket. The ticket is then assigned to the final approver (who is usually the CIO or another officer just below) who evaluates the ticket, verifies the approvals, verifies the finanical impact, approves the ticket, then assigns it to the Desktop Admin. The Desktop Admin then assigns the ticket to a Support Technician to be implemented. (ie. installed) (Oh, and I'm a member of IT and a Support Analyst, by the way.)
At any point in that process, if there is a denial. The whole thing must be reviewed, reentered, and start all over again.
This, I drop it in the CD-ROM, install nothing, run the X apps I need to run on the UNIX gear I monitor. Remove the CD, reboot, and no impact to the installed system that requires red tape.
Does that help?
"Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
Well, cygwin normally needs to be installed with registry entries to tell it where to find its root directory (and potentially other "mounted fs"'s, too). Presumably this CD has a hacked version that doesn't need those entries (perhaps by just using the path to cygwin1.dll returned by GetModulePath() to derive it automatically for each new program started?).
That's funny when you consider that the awkwardness of Winblows is the whole reason to use this CD. When I have a guest, it's as easy to let them use my network as adduser. The guests don't have to be in my house either. Uptime? People like Steve Ballmer who aim for 60 days of uptime worry about that. I've gotten used to my power failing before my computers do. While it's nice to have good ssh clients, using them on a system that's notorious for auto installing keyloggers is foolish. Finally, when you use something like knoppix, you generally get as good or better performance as Windows gives loaded down as it usually is by utilities that fail to keep malware off.
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. ... the Knoppix startup will often be unable to use anything better than a generic VESA driver
Your hardware must be different from the hardware I see most of the time. I've seen Knoppix boot up AMD 64 systems and other cutting edge stuff without problems. A set that won't give at least 1024 by 768 resolution is rare and you can try to force better with "ctrl alt +" if the conservative setting is not good enough for you. This might not be good enough for playing games, but it's more than enough to show off the real work that can be done with two office suits and two excellent browsers. Others, such as Morphix, have game CDs if you want that. The only place a boot CD might have problems with hardware is wireless networking, but wrapper software can fix that. Hardware compatibility, by the way, is much easier than software compatibility. M$ can break this toy with a single Winblows update as they have broken people's X and unix connectivity in the past. As time goes by, your chances of everthing working will be greater with an old Knoppix than it will be with an old copy of this CD.
Knoppix and CDs like it are the easiest and most secure way to move files. Once booted, you can use Konqueror's built in sftp to drag and drop files across a split window. What could be easier than that? If you want quick, zip the files and boot with business card linux and use sftp from the command line.
Finally, there's nothing like running a live linux CD to show your buddy just how easy it is to get Linux. If there are problems, it's better they show up there than later.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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
I made just such a CD for myself nearly 3 years ago so that I could have cygwin (particularly SSH), emacs, CVS, Java, and Mozilla with me wherever I happened to be, such as in the classroom. The fun part was getting the autorun feature to properly set up the paths. I also made use of the TMP variable as the directory where I could write to the local disk when needed. I suppose what I really should do is establish a RAM disk.
I have recently even been considering migrating to a DVD so I can install the full cygwin installation along with Firefox and plugins; music and video players and rippers; some USB device drivers for my camera, MP3 players, voice recorder, and smart media scanner; and if I can figure it out also the synchronization software for my phone and PDA so I am not tied to a single machine!
I suppose you could add games, too., as if I had time for such things. Hm... the CD emulator with the CD images... I could perhaps include a few of my favorite classics!
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
I'm sure you meant otherwise, but saying you prefer [a client] over [a protocol] makes no sense. I use putty to connect to my linux firewall which runs openssh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Free software is about choice. You would deny Windows users that same choice that you trumpet from the parapets all day long about the One True OS - Linux? Free software is also about zero cost, you would deny that as well to the windows world? You'd also deny Mac users a powerful user/development experience wouldn't you? What a load of hypocrisy.
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
IMO, applications should do this anyway. I hate programs that require setting some XYZ_HOME environment variable so that it can find itself. Any executable should know where it is, period. Of course I'm biased with a Mac background, as I expect something to run wherever I put it. I find that using GetModulePath(), realpath(), and [[NSBundle mainBundle] executablePath] makes my code perform nicely on each platform. I just put the exe and its files anywhere I want. Registry settings and environment variables are handy for programmers, but they're horrendous from a user interface standpoint.
Maybe in the short term, but in the long term if people have most of their software being multi-OS FOSS, they have less of a barrier to change OS (instead of having to learn to use different software and a different OS, they just have to learn the OS), so they might be more likely to change to linux eventually.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
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.