OSNews

wow! Now I don't need vnc anymore, except for connecting to a running :0 session

So will MS make you buy a license for each pc you run your livecd on ? :-)
Since your going to have to buy at least one license I don't really see the point of this.

Read the article, it is not a "LiveCD as we normally think of the term. It runs an X server from the CD under an already installed Windows system. This way it could be used in public terminals where there is CD-ROM access but users are not allowed to install software.

I have been pleading and begging the admin in the school lab I use to give me access to cygwin to be able to ssh to my home machine and work in the public lab, and they wouldn't.

I was "caught" using a liveCD of ubuntu, and told to not do that anymore, so they've disallowed CD booting (argh!!!). This will be great to have in my backpack for those times I need to work in a public lab and need to access the applications I use instead of the normal offerings!!!

hey, this is a nice idea!
I am going to throw an eye on it and see how to put it on my flashdrive instead. Much more handy

Even nicer if someone made a "live" CD like this using a NX/FreeNX client. The NX technology from NoMachine provides higher performance on low bandwidth connections than X and enables the user to disconnect from and reattach to existing sessions. Even sessions lost due to network problems can be recovered easily. Requires installation of the FreeNX Server. http://www.nomachine.com

Is this similiar to xwin32 where it lets you run the X apps from the server on your local PC? And a noob question, but in order to run the apps, you need to have an X server on your server, then an X server on Windows so it can display it?

Thanks for helping out someone who is not knowledgable on this subject

> Is this similiar to xwin32 where it lets you run the X apps from the server on your local PC?
Conceptually, yes. In implementation it is much more as the XLiveCD has many of the GNU *NIX programs & tools.

> but in order to run the apps, you need to have an X server on your server, then an X server on Windows so it can display it?
Yes to a X server on the the machine you are connecting to server. No to an X server on Windows because the XLiveCD is the Cygwin tools with its own X server.
( more to come )

The XLiveCD system does not eat much RAM. I have run it on Pentium3 450MHz with WindowsXPSP2 with 384MB RAM connected to a Celeron 533MHz running Knoppix 3.6. On the Windows PC, from insertion of the CD until the seeing the dialog box was about 15 seconds. Two click of the mouse is all that is needed to confirm the execution of the X server. It took about 1 minute 20 seconds for it to present me an xterm window. My testing on other machines indicate that it is not CPU speed limited. In most cases the CDROM drive will be the leading limiting factor (or startup time chokepoint) and then comes the CPU.

Directions for testing XLiveCD without installing anything anywhere.
Required:
- 2 networked PCs
- One of the PC must be running some form of windows
- This PC should not have the cygwin tools installed on it
- The other PC doesn't matter as it will be running Knoppix.
- One copy of XLiveCD
- One copy of Knoppix. I will use Knoppix 3.6.

Boot PC2 with Knoppix 3.6. I used no bootup cheat codes and it goes into a graphical KDE desktop. I use the knoppix menu icon (the penguin) and start the SSH service. It will create the host keys and then prompt for the knoppix user's passwd. I used the passwd 'knoppix'. Since comes with sshd configured with X11Forwarding enabled (see the /etc/ssh/sshd_config in Knoppix) by default, no other configuration is necessary. CLick on the terminal icon & bring up konsole. Type ifconfig to find the IP address that it was assigned by the DHCP server (in my case 10.100.100.2).

In PC1 put XLiveCD in the drive. The autorun dialog will come up. Select to use 2 or 3 button mouse. click next. Some time later and Xterm appears on the screen. In that Xterm, type the following:
ssh -X -v -C knoppix@10.100.100.2 konsole
(or you can leave konsole off the end of the command to get an interactive ssh session.)

It will spew copious amounts of text across the screen. (This is good). Then it will ask for the knoppix user's password. Type knoppix and hit enter. A couple moments later you will have a KDE konsole on your windows dekstop. You can open up other applications too. Try running gaim, gimp, kicker or konqeror. When you had enough, you can just close all the apps like you normally would. You can close the Xterm or CTRL-C the Xterm and you are done. Compressed secure X11 session forwarded from 1 PC to another with nothing to install or uninstall for $0.00.
Enjoy.

Note: Any data, text, & opinions stated are mine & mine only. They do not represent the opinion of my employer or it's shareholders.

> Yes to a X server on the the machine you are connecting to server

No, the server machine does not need to have an operationnal X server. Only X libraries are required to run X applications from the server machine. The X application (seen as an X client) runs on the server and shows up on your Windows PC, using the X server from your CD.
If you only use ssh or telnet, no X is required at all on the server machine.

Thank you James and Damien. You guys have been most helpful and I can't wait to try this out when I get home (which will be a lot later tonight, Christmas shopping and all).

Hmm... looks VERY cool, but when I try to load anything, it complains that cygwin1.dll is missing. When I download cygwin1.dll and put it in /usr/X11R6/bin, trying to run different programs causes different errors to come up, but all are about how there's a function missing. Anyone else had this problem?

Is it possible to just copy files to HDD and run it from there?

Or should I just use the iso and mount it under Daemon Tools (on my home computer of course).

I have been pleading and begging the admin in the school lab I use to give me access to cygwin to be able to ssh to my home machine and work in the public lab, and they wouldn't.

In a school lab, they don't need to install cygwin just for ssh, they can install a GUI terminal and sftp client for free.
http://www.ssh.com/support/downloads/secureshellwks/non-commercial....

Alternately, instead of carrying around an X Windows server just for ssh, how about just an ssh client on a floppy (or anything larger?) PuTTY requires no installation and only alters its key within the Current User portion of the registry.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Finally, you could use Mindterm, the SSH java applet from storage media or embedded in a web page (preferably on the server to which you wish to connect).
http://freshmeat.net/projects/mindterm/

This would be even more impressive if it allowed you to connect to an existing XDMCP server. That would make my life so easy!

Can one query for an XDMCP server? If so, how?

I like this.

Dunno about xdmcp but I will in a few minutes.

I'm downloading it over Bittorrent, and piece #289 isn't being accepted, so I'm stuck on 99.9%, argh.

just pull from one of their direct download links, i think that my 5.6 gigs i have uploaded into the hive more than makes up for it for ya

Ophidian

...because none of those options does X forwarding, that's why.

The protential for this little project could be quite interesting...

It would be nice to see and have a knoppix style self loading os over windows....

main reason just cause its possible..

but this looks very need for Home networking etc...

AFAICT this is just Cygwin on a CD, plus some glue to make i run straight off the CD. If you're going to install it on you HD anyway, just install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com , especially Cygwin/X).

What I used to do in my uni's computer lab was download PuTTY and tell IE to run it instead of saving it. The exe was small enough that it wasn't much of a hassle.

Adam W: If you don't need to run X apps, PuTTY by itself is quite nifty.

The only X-app I would like to use that is not already cross-platform is evolution, and quite a few of the more useful widgits don't seem to work. (For example, the pull-down attached to the New button).

They should integrate this with coLinux so that all of your Windows apps and all of your Linux apps are available locally/natively.

Im interested of doing something like this with a USB memory stick. Do you think it's possible?

I would love to now see KDE added to this and I would be set... I love Linux but Windows is the norm. I can have my KDE and use it too, lol!

http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/

http://www.hostalive.net/cxlaunch.html

I still think that putty + XDeep/32 is far more practical solution. XDeep/32 if free as a beer, and can be downloaded from here

http://www.pexus.com/Download/downloadFiles.html

Easy, my magic ball google says

http://www.google.com.ar/search?q=xdmcp+honor+indirect&sourceid=fir...

This is a quick setup guide:

http://www.glug.us/phpwiki/index.php?How%20To%20Setup%2...

This is the howto

http://www.linuxjunkies.org/html/XDMCP-HOWTO.html

Those wikies are wicked on the spaces :S

i have made a small change so that i can use the xlive on my usb pen drive, with the usb2 interface it loads quite fast.

the hack is just changing the
set cddrv=%CURDRIVE%:
line with
set cddrv=%CURDRIVE%:xlive
where xlive is the folder i have put all the xlive files in.

i have also omitted the install and src files from the livecd folder so that it does not fill my usb pen up with data i dont need.

i think that this version still saves some things on the harddrive, but i will look into that too and then make the changes so that all the data will be saved on the drive.

thank you xlive for making my life easy.
one thing irritates me, and that is that i cant make an autorun menu for such a drive, it could be nifty to have a menu kind of like the menu on the cd.

Great. Anything more that one has to think of? Any special USB memory stick that you use? Im considering buying USBDisk 256MB 2.0 TwinMOSVersion Z4.