Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
For decades, X11 has provided the possibility to have many virtual desktops that can be accessed by different people from different machines. The virtual desktops are thus independent of the real physical desktop.
I'm wondering whether there is something similar already on MS windows OS. I would think this could be easily done if virtual desktop managers could make the virtual desktops ---that they already maintain in memory--- available to remote desktop applications.
My needs come from the following situation. Often time, I have to provide support to remote users. In many cases, the support would take hours. Unfortunately, during this time, the user's computer is completely control by us and the user can't do anything. Now my question is whether there is a solution that would allow us to work and repair the user's computer on one virtual desktop while the user is actually working on the other virtual desktop attached the physical one.
Any input would be much appreciated.
Klaus.
The desktop versions of Windows are artificially limited by Microsoft to one desktop session at a time. They want you to spend the big bucks on Terminal Server if you want to have multiple sessions.
Workstation builds of Windows (with the notable exception of Media Center Edition, to support extender devices) are hardcoded to prevent concurrent sessions. That said, there are very unofficial third party binary patches that modify the Terminal Services code to remove the limitation.
Remote Desktop, from Microsoft is what you are looking for.
There are hacks for various versions of windows that allow concurrent Remote Desktop sessions. Here's one for Windows 7, but similar exist for vista and XP.
Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about a specific programming problem, a software algorithm, or software tools primarily used by programmers. If you believe the question would be on-topic on another Stack Exchange site, you can leave a comment to explain where the question may be able to be answered.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
This is part of a migration from Vista to Windows7. I now have a dual boot computer, with Win7 the preferred OS. From time to time I might need to go back to Vista to see how the things were configured there and then I will need to go back to Win7 to configure/install the same app there.
This is a computer that had very complex settings and it was difficult and risky to upgrade in place, to install Win7 over Vista.
In order to avoid countless reboots I would like to be able to always run Win7 and when I need I would like to be able to fire up VMWare Workstation and to start a Vista Machine that would have as HDD the physical HDD where currently Vista resides. I would expect the VMWare machine to run the OS installed on that HDD and I would expect Vista no to see that the hardware changed. My apps are not hardware dependent.
Is this possible?
Its possible and there are a few ways you could go about doing this.
The Easy Way
VMware Desktop allows you to use your existing partition/Disk to boot from only if its an IDE Disk.
https://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_disk_dualboot.html
The hard way
You can capture the Windows Vista OS as an .wim image with Windows Deployment Tool ImageX.exe. Then use other tools to create a bootable ISO. You would have to update the image though every time you feel there are a lot of changes made in Vista you want to see in VMware.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 11 years ago.
Improve this question
Here are the couple of things we are trying to achieve
Our staff currently uses a bunch of desktops and laptops. Around 30-5o of the staff, most of them are laptops (mix of HP and Lenovo). Most using Win 7 professional , a minority using XP. What is the best way to
Manage pushing the windows updates to everyone's computer since not every one installs the updates by themselves.
Managing inventory through a software so that we know how many computers are there, who is using which one, which are currently being used and which ones are in repair.
Good to have feature would also be able to install software remotely and perfom maintenance remotely.
I am fine with a solution that may not solve all the above so would love to know which one can help with most of these issues.
Thank you.
You need a Software Management Solution, and Microsoft provides just such a server/client infrastructure.
http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/configurationmanager/en/us/sms.aspx
Google also launched an open source effort last year to reduce the cost of software licenses by allowing employees to visit the tool, and uninstall apps. Not quite what your looking for, but you could likely extend their offering to get some use.
http://code.google.com/p/appreduce/
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
Can you host demos of open source apps online, similar to how http://php.opensourcecms.com/ does for CMSs? For example, could you host a demo of Open Office for people to try out online? Maybe by connecting to a server that has Windows 7 installed or some Windows 7 simulator. How would you do that if you could?
It would certainly be possible, using something like a combination of remote desktop and virtual servers, however I haven't seen any solution like that.
The main reason for that is of course that it would require a lot of hardware. While a web server can handle thousands of concurrent users, a server running virtual remote sessions would be able to handle something in the range of 10-20 concurrent users.
Being somewhere around 100 times more expensive than running web servers, one can easily see why there is little demand for such technology.
There are various ways in which the visual display and mouse interaction of a Windows app can appear on a user's machine while actually running remotely. Refer to—for instance—the RFB protocol which is used by VNC.
It even appears there are some efforts to embed such remote screens into browsers using Flash. I haven't tried it:
http://flashlight-vnc.sourceforge.net/
As #Guffa points out, this really won't scale very well. But at smaller scales it's important to be aware of: I'm a big advocate of using approaches like this when someone has a niche legacy intranet application written in something like Visual Basic that only a few people use. (Why rewrite something that already works in Ruby-on-Rails or whatever if only 10 people in the world will ever use it?)
At a meta-level, I think dropping users into an app they don't know how to use isn't always the best way of selling it. With pervasive Internet video I think there's a big potential for screencasts to explain and introduce software, or teach them features:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast
It shows people what's possible, is easy for them to pass around, and is a lot less of a development/administrative/security effort on your part.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Closed 5 years ago.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
This question does not appear to be about a specific programming problem, a software algorithm, or software tools primarily used by programmers. If you believe the question would be on-topic on another Stack Exchange site, you can leave a comment to explain where the question may be able to be answered.
Improve this question
I am mostly interested in developing for windows (primary) and a mac.
I have a normal PC and a mac mini, and I want to be able to use a single keyboard, mouse and a monitor with both.
Which kvm software do you recommend?
I was looking for hardware kvms but I am using a 30" lcd which is only supported by 1 belkin kvm and people report it as not working.
http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
Synergy is a software based KVM. It might take you some time to get it set up, but once you do, you'll love it.
In your case, I think the best software solution is to physically connect the Mac to the monitor, and using Remote Desktop to connect to the PC. You'll have very little display lag and almost zero input lag, compared to VNC.
As an added benefit, you can resize your Remote Desktop window to sit side-by-side with a window on your Mac, so you won't lose context when switching between Mac & Windows.
The only downside is that you'll have to crawl under the desk and swap the DVI cable if the Windows machine fails to boot when something goes wrong. That said, at my office we have a test machine that we've been using exclusively via Remote Desktop/VNC for about 3 or 4 years.
Every machine I use is running in a VM. I connect to the Windows machines via Remote Desktop, and I connect to the Linux machines via the VMware Remote Console.
I use VMWare in spaces, but if I had two boxes like you had I'd use a remote desktop connection.
If what you want is to have one monitor for two machines, then you probably need to either use a hardware DVI switch, or use a VNC/Remote Deskop client to pop in to the other desktop when you need to get there.
Personally, I have a 3 monitor, two machine setup. My main box has 2 monitors, the mouse, and the keyboard. The other box has the third monitor. As mentioned above, I use Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse between machines. In general it works very well.
Keyboard switching hotkey is Scroll Lock twice then up arrow.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
When opening Remote Desktop to different Windows servers, it is easy to confuse two remote desktops.
How do I get each remote server to automatically display some system information as desktop wallpaper, ie. Computer Name, Operating System, IP Address, etc.
I've used BGInfo from the SysInternals guys to do this in the past.
Nothing nearly as sophisticated, but I change the desktop colour to a fairly strong primary that is easily distinguishable. Now people say "it's on the red one", so it works as a way of simply and easily telling machines apart.
There are a number of offerings for desktop widgets. Why not try the following for starters:
Yahoo! Widgets
Google Desktop
Unless I'm missing something, the easiest way to do it would be to create a desktop image for each machine listing the Computer Name, Operating System, IP Address, etc.
Assuming that you're using Windows, a more complex but cooler way to do it would be to use Rainmaker and Enigma to dynamically generate the information and embed it into the desktop. Installing and using both Rainmaker and Enigma just to get the hostname might be overkill, but you can also have it display the output from various processes so you can monitor whatever system metrics you require: free/used memory, CPU use, network traffic, what have you.
Desktop Info shows more information and is easily configurable:
http://www.glenn.delahoy.com/software/