On 2003.05.04 18:28 Karthik Poobalasubramanian wrote: > Hi all > I had finally managed to put in mandrake on my desktop with X working quite > well. Now on the desktop running Mandrake I had configured a webserver, > sshd, Well just few minutes back i used secure shell from my laptop running > redhat 9.1 logged on to the desktop. just out of curiosity i just typed in > kmail after i logged in. And the kmail client opened. I could see all my > mails which are on the desktop and i could send and receive mails as if i am > using the kmail on my desktop. Now could somebody explain to me how this > happened? I never even configured the remote desktop program. I have also not > configured the kmail client on the laptop. In fact i am typing this mail from > my laptop using the kmail client on my desktop. I am not sure hoe much of > this makes sense to anyone.
As others have pointed out, that's part of X. MIT's Athena project from 1993 is indeed impressive. OpenBSD's secure shell took advantage of it. It's amazing that 10 years later companies are making money selling inferior closed source rippofs for Microsoft's dinky GUI. X forwarding through secure shell, sweet is it not? If you want a "desktop" try "kdesktop &" which runs as an ordinary X window. You can also run "kicker &" and have the kde panel show up. "xterm &" will give you another terminal from the remote machine. It's almost as good as sitting at all of your computers at once. I have 5 sharing one monitor and keyboard, a gateway, a music server, a DNS server/experiment box, the terminal and a mail and records box. It is nice to keep all your email on a single machine and still be able to reach it. You may also have a secure ftp server on both machines too. Try "sftp [EMAIL PROTECTED]" or the ssh and ssh2 option of the program gftp, a graphical client. It generally works best to use the desktop as a remote machine and the laptop as a terminal. Desktops typically give you more processing power per dollar while laptops fit better on your desk. Going the other way, laptops usually have pccards. I use my laptop and a compact flash adapter to get pictures off my cameras. No more dinky proprietary programs or USB hassles.
