Joeri Sebrechts
11-08-2001, 08:42 AM
My desktop machine gets typical desktop usage. Sometimes there are short high-load bursts where i need the athlon 700 in it, but most of the time it's just sitting there with a load of almost 0.
Since my sisters surf the internet with a measly pentium 75 I figured I'd give them something more decent, a VNC connection that runs mozilla at the full speed the cable connection is capable of.
First I installed debian's vncserver package. Next I made a new user called vnc to run mozilla as. In this user's home dir I created a .vncrc file containing:
$vncStartup = "~/.xinitrc"
$geometry = "640x480"
Actually, the above geometry doesn't fit on their VGA screen, because windows' start bar takes up screen real estate, and fullscreening the VNC viewer for windows is too much to ask from them (they don't really know that much about PC's)
Then came the quest for a good window manager. None of the wm's I use myself were usable, because they either sucked too much resources (this is MY desktop after all) or because they don't resemble windows enough. So I looked around and found qvwm, a window manager designed to look like windows, and on top of that it had a simple configuration file format, with plenty of tweaking possible.
I created a new .qvwmrc that changed the desktop to display a single icon, that of mozilla, and in the start menu all that's visible is mozilla and a few games. There is no (known) way to shut down the window manager. At most they can restart it. They also can't edit the desktop or start menu. I suppose they could mess with mozilla, but if they find the preferences menu that would be a small miracle.
I installed crossover plugin in mozilla, so that in addition to flash and java, quicktime, shockwave, word, excel and powerpoint documents would also be displayed.
Next was making sure it ran automatically. I created a bootup script /etc/init.d/vncsessions which allows starting and stopping of the vnc session. To run the vnc server as the vnc user i made earlier I used:
su - vnc -c "/usr/X11R6/bin/vncserver :1 2> /dev/null"
This also makes sure it always runs on screen 1. I added the correct links so this starts on bootup and shuts down on shutdown. But I came across a problem.
I use kdm, which starts on bootup, obviously. And if you start this vnc session after kdm, kdm doesn't receive keyboard input (for some strange reason). No problem you say, start it before. Yes, but then it goes to look for a /tmp/.X11-unix directory and creates one if it's not there. But since this script runs as user vnc, once kdm comes around, running as user root it sees this .X11-unix directory made by the user vnc, suspects foul play and shuts down. Likewise, startx doesn't work.
The solution turned out to create the .X11-unix directory manually, with the correct permissions (1777), before I spawn off the su command to start up the vnc server. Tricky, but it works.
Since my sisters surf the internet with a measly pentium 75 I figured I'd give them something more decent, a VNC connection that runs mozilla at the full speed the cable connection is capable of.
First I installed debian's vncserver package. Next I made a new user called vnc to run mozilla as. In this user's home dir I created a .vncrc file containing:
$vncStartup = "~/.xinitrc"
$geometry = "640x480"
Actually, the above geometry doesn't fit on their VGA screen, because windows' start bar takes up screen real estate, and fullscreening the VNC viewer for windows is too much to ask from them (they don't really know that much about PC's)
Then came the quest for a good window manager. None of the wm's I use myself were usable, because they either sucked too much resources (this is MY desktop after all) or because they don't resemble windows enough. So I looked around and found qvwm, a window manager designed to look like windows, and on top of that it had a simple configuration file format, with plenty of tweaking possible.
I created a new .qvwmrc that changed the desktop to display a single icon, that of mozilla, and in the start menu all that's visible is mozilla and a few games. There is no (known) way to shut down the window manager. At most they can restart it. They also can't edit the desktop or start menu. I suppose they could mess with mozilla, but if they find the preferences menu that would be a small miracle.
I installed crossover plugin in mozilla, so that in addition to flash and java, quicktime, shockwave, word, excel and powerpoint documents would also be displayed.
Next was making sure it ran automatically. I created a bootup script /etc/init.d/vncsessions which allows starting and stopping of the vnc session. To run the vnc server as the vnc user i made earlier I used:
su - vnc -c "/usr/X11R6/bin/vncserver :1 2> /dev/null"
This also makes sure it always runs on screen 1. I added the correct links so this starts on bootup and shuts down on shutdown. But I came across a problem.
I use kdm, which starts on bootup, obviously. And if you start this vnc session after kdm, kdm doesn't receive keyboard input (for some strange reason). No problem you say, start it before. Yes, but then it goes to look for a /tmp/.X11-unix directory and creates one if it's not there. But since this script runs as user vnc, once kdm comes around, running as user root it sees this .X11-unix directory made by the user vnc, suspects foul play and shuts down. Likewise, startx doesn't work.
The solution turned out to create the .X11-unix directory manually, with the correct permissions (1777), before I spawn off the su command to start up the vnc server. Tricky, but it works.