On 11/29/09 5:57 PM, "Mike Myers" <[email protected]> wrote:
> d lets me enter commands, but it just acts like a > terminal window. What I am looking for is a desktop environment like I > get when I login to my Ubuntu linux system, one with an action bar thet > gives me pull-downs from which I can open applications that will also > run in windows. Am I expecting too much when I am looking for one > Linux's "worksation" interface (like zLinux's) to look roughly like > another's (Ubuntu Linux, Knoppix Linux, or any of the other Linux > distros I have used)? You're dealing with the difference between a server-oriented distribution and desktop-oriented distributions. Ubuntu, Knoppix, etc are oriented at desktop machines with mice and bitmapped displays. A System Z doesn't have either, so there's not much point in starting a GUI desktop up there -- it's just going to fail to detect the necessary hardware and exit. VNC fakes some of that stuff, but you're going to have to burn a lot of unnecessary cycles to do this. The System Z distributions are oriented toward standard Unix server tasks, which typically don't need, want or provide GUI interfaces; you're expected to use the command line to manage servers in Unix-land. You can run the GUI stuff on Linux on z, but you're going to direct the output and the windows over the network to a desktop system via the X window system. The simplest solution is to type the following in your terminal window: DISPLAY=your.workstation.address:0.0;export DISPLAY And then start your favorite window manager or desktop environment (GNOME or KDE). The machine you specify in the DISPLAY value must be running an X windows server. You then get the GUI app stuff running on the remote machine, but using the desktop system as the bitmap display. Then you should have the environment you want -- at the expense of a *lot* of System Z CPU and network traffic. Running this way under Hercules will be excruciatingly painful, in that you can easily use up 1/3 to 1/2 of your 390 cycles doing GUI stuff. > Is there some way that you can get such a desktop as a zLinux logged-in > user? Linux on z users get command line by default. Any GUI stuff has to be done to a remote display as described above, or via VNC, both at a ruinous cost in resources. I don't even load the X tools on most of my servers, regardless of platform. The only reason I do on RHEL servers is that sshd is linked with the X libraries to allow X forwarding. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
