jose isaias cabrera wrote on Monday, December 03, 2007 11:43 PM::

> Just to complete this issue, I had to delete the account and recreate
> it. The reason why was that I previously had an SPARC sunworkstion
> with Gentoo on it, and I rsync-ed all of the files and directories
> from that server.  I was running gnome on that server also, but
> somehow the previous settings were getting picked up by the new
> gnome, which was a newer version and it was kicking me out.  After
> creating the new user with the same name I am able to login and do my
> work. 
> 
> thanks,
> 
> josé

I'm glad you've got it working, but just for the benefit of anyone
picking up on this thread via the archives, unless you really *want*
to run a Linux desktop in XWin, the advice to use XDMCP is wrong (or 
at least, it's not the best advice).

The recommended way to run client applications is documented in the
XWin user guide:
 http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ug/using-remote-apps.html

Using ssh is secure, reliable and easy both on the network and the 
remote box.

In contrast, XDMCP is woefully insecure, overkill for running 
individual applications, and inefficient in terms of network resources 
and the remote host's resources - all window manager operations are 
transmitted over the network in addition to anything going on in the 
client area of the windows.  If in doubt, watch the spike in network 
activity when you drag a window under XDMCP.  Compare this with the 
same action using ssh tunnelling.  At the same time, you can also 
watch the spike in CPU activity on the remote box.

If you are running Gnome or KDE on the Linux box, you are running a 
fairly resource heavy application.  There have been efforts lately to 
reduce their footprint, but try getting 100 users connecting to your
Linux box, each using XDMCP and you'll soon notice the difference.

Using XDMCP to run display managers also goes against the spirit of X, 
which is to have a single, local display and window-manager/desktop on 
which you can run clients on many different hosts.  XDMCP was developed
to allow using X on the graphical equivalent of dumb-terminals.

Another "problem" with using XDMCP is that the remote X clients are,
as far as Windows is concerned, just one application - XWin.  You
cannot use alt-tab to cycle through your Windows and your Linux clients
at the same time.  If you connect to multiple remote hosts, each using
XDMCP, things can quickly become confusing.

Sorry if that all sounded a bit preachy - it wasn't meant to.  I only 
want people to make informed decisions, not make the decisions for 
them.

Phil

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