Hi,
On 05/05/2016 04:17 AM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 05/04/2016 03:39 PM, van Sleeuwen, Berry wrote:
[... snipped ...]
In the world of "UNIX graybeards" it has always been conventional
wisdom that servers don't run a GUI. A lot of people do it, but that
doesn't make it the right thing to do, for exactly the reasons you cite
above, and more. (security, for example)
Note well that, as several people have pointed out in this thread, not
running a GUI on a server does not preclude the use of GUI-based
installers, if one is actually required (as you mention above) in the
first place. For decades the UNIX world has enjoyed the benefits of
network-based windowing systems...No "remote desktop", no "copying"
screen contents across the network, or other such foolishness...but
native "open this window OVER THERE" behaviors that do not require
graphics hardware (and its attendant hundreds of thousands of lines of
code) on the system on which the GUIfied program is executed.
Do note that although the entire underlying concept of the X11 windowing
system has always been that it is fully network based, and thus it
doesn't matter where the applications are running, modern Desktop
Environments mostly destroy this notion with an implicit and deeply
ingrained "one man, one computer" assumption.
In the original implementations of X11, *all* programs were remote from
the perspective of the X11 display server, which ran on a specialized X
Terminal device that did nothing but run the display server. It
contacted some remote server to present the initial display, which was
either a login screen or a host chooser. In this setup, although the
servers didn't "run a GUI" in the sense of the console of the server
having a GUI interface for the sysadmin (the console was typically an
RS232 terminal), the servers *did* "run a GUI" in the sense that all
users logged in to their X11 login session on the server. A basic X11
login session, however, was much more light-weight back then than a
"Desktop Environment" is today.
These good old times are long gone, and a typical X11 setup these days
behaves a lot more like a typical Windows PC, in that all the funky
"Desktop Environment" software implicitly assumes that there is a single
user running on their own personal computer with lots of spare CPU &
RAM, where all their applications are running. Wasting hundreds of
megabytes of RAM and several percent of your 3GHz of CPU cycles for a
simple cute looking clock in the corner is not considered an issue at all.
However, the underlying network mechanisms are all still there, so it's
not too hard to set things up such that any given application gets
started on any given remote server, as desired.
The "ssh -X" method that I suggested earlier is a common method these
days, but if you don't actually care about secure encryption of your X11
display traffic on the local lan, it's actually unnecessary overhead,
and simply pointing the DISPLAY variable in your shell session on the
server to your X11 server's address and setting up good old xauth may
well work better.
The OP's question was sufficiently non-specific that we just don't know
what they were actually trying to achieve, so I'm hoping we'll get some
further clarification on that.
I do agree that actually running a full modern GUI "Desktop Environment"
on a Z server (which is what you would get when, say, you run a VNC X11
server session on zlinux), although entirely possible, is mostly likely
*not* what you actually want, as that will consume way too many way too
expensive CPU/RAM resources on the Z system that you really should
off-load to another (cheaper) platform. And installing X11 on zlinux
just because some documentation falsely assumes that you cannot possibly
do sysadmin work without a GUI console is definitely a no no.
But having users run a specific X11 based application on zlinux might
under some circumstances make sense and is not difficult to set up.
Willy
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