I have two LCDs at work from having both a Windows and Linux PC on my desk. I need both right now due to some inane dependence on Windows-based process tools that were not of my choosing, but lets not go there.
To keep myself as productive as possible, I really just want to shove the two LCDs together and use one keyboard and mouse with a dual-screen setup. With one being Linux and the other Windows I won’t be able to move windows between the two displays but that’s ok. In the future I could put both LCDs on a single OS and access the other remotely but right now this is sufficient.
To make this work I’m leaning on x2vnc for a lovely dual-screen hack. Unfortunately it didn’t work initially, as the latest x2vnc speaks VNC 3.3 and TightVNC speaks 3.8 with no option that I could find to be backwards compatible. So, I looked around and I found RealVNC. The free, GPL version does have a backwards compatability mode of (use protocol 3.3 only) which I enabled, and now it’s working.
The VNC window on my Linux box is a thin, single pixel border on the east side of my monitor, and when I cross it I end up on the Windows box due to Microsoft’s ludicrous idea of a multi-user platform. So, thanks to the x2vnc developers, the RealVNC developers, and hey thanks Microsoft for being so lazy. It works great.
2 Comments
How about visualization? I run Windows in a KVM, and rdesktop into it. I only need Windows to access a VPN that only has a client on Windows. Upside of Windows in KVM is that you have all your systems running a real OS.
Right now virtualization would require me the overhead of setting up the existing box as a VM. That’s more work than simply using the existing box the way that it is.
Maybe I could clone the harddrive using a Linux rescue image and scp it across to the Linux box, but both boxes also have limited harddrive space. I might try it if I could get some new disks for the Linux box. The hardware is a tad old.