Wine as Windows Terminal Server?
Boaz Harrosh
wine at electrozaur.com
Sun Apr 9 08:59:48 CDT 2006
Samuel Hunt wrote:
> Thought for you all.....
>
>
> Would it be possible to use Wine with a few extra bits to make a kind
> of Windows Terminal Server?
>
> So you login via VNC, and the Wine system prompts you for a username
> and password, which it authenticates. It then loads up a "desktop",
> with a fake "Start" menu, that you have things similar to a normal
> start menu, but more appropriate to a terminal server environment.
>
> You then run your programs, but all the I/O is to/from the remote
> client, and each session is independent of each other, so there can be
> lots of different clients with different permissions (so admin may
> have full access to all of the drive, but users have various bits of
> their "hard drive" read-only and things like that).
>
>
>
> Would seem to make Wine very useful if that could be done. Then VNC
> clients simply see a "Windows" desktop, and can do what they want, but
> all the back-end is Wine and Linux.
>
>
> Sam
>
>
>
I have done something similar but with the X11 protocol.
The client user browses to a web site (somewhere on the LAN). He than
gets a Menu of applications /Sessions he can use. If these clients are
Linux than no problem an ssh-X session is initiated to open that
application. ( We used a load balanced collection of servers). If it was
a Windows Client than first time comers get an OCX installed that in
turn installs XMing X-Server and plink. Once installed, the web page
will initiate the same ssh-X session as before. We chose remote
application to run as Native apps so there is no distinction between
locally running or remote applications. But a desktop mode can be used
as well.
One thing to watch out is that: Currently, wine does not support
multiple X connections on the same WineServer. What I did is use the ssh
connection environment variables and set up a quick on-the-fly wine
$WINEPREFIX folder for each new session. This gave me a nice Cytrix like
control over what gets saved during a session. (Which was nothing in our
case)
Remoting is nothing new to Linux, and VNC could work Just as well. Wine
is just a regular X-client application. Anything that applies to a Linux
application also applies to a Wine application running under Wine.
Free Life
Boaz
More information about the wine-devel
mailing list