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




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