Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

My laptop took a header onto the floor and the corner of the case is
smashed up. If it is pressed back into shape, the monitor turns off
– this makes it hard to type on.

Since the desktop configured just the way I like it as well as a
chroot debian/unstable environment for building debian packages I
wanted a way to get to the laptop from my other work (Compaq Deskpro
EN running Red Hat 8.0) and other home systems (specifically my wife’s
Microsoft Windows 2000 laptop + cygwin).

The solution was to enable Xd
mcp on the laptop and then connect to
it from the other system’s X servers. Here are the steps.

• On the laptop which uses kdm, edit /etc/kde2/kdmrc and look for
  the [Xdmcp] section and enable it. The line looks like this

  [Xdmcp]
  ...
  # Whether KDM should listen to XDMCP requests. Default is false for Debian.
  Enable=true
  ...
  

• Now edit /etc/kde2/kdm/Xaccess to allow access. Uncomment the two
  lines that look like this:

  ...
  *                                       #any host can get a login window
  ...
  *               CHOOSER BROADCAST       #any indirect host can get a chooser
  ...
  

  You can tighten up security by enumerating all the systems you want
  access from. Since both of the networks my laptop connects to (home
  behind a NATting firewall and work’s corpnet) are secure enough for me
  so I didn’t bother.

• Now restart kdm on the laptop, “/etc/init.d/kdm restart”

• From the linux desktop, startup X and have it connect to my laptop’s XDMCP:

  X -broadcast -query mylaptop.name :1
  

  And in a few seconds there is the familar KDM login on ALT-F8.

• From the Microsoft Windows 2000 desktop that has cygwin installed,
  startup X and have it connect to my laptop’s XDMCP:

  X -broadcast -query mylaptop.name :1
  

  And in a few seconds there is a window that contains the
  familar KDM login.

Performance is acceptable across WiFi.

Tags: linux

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2003 at 11:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.