March 19, 2001, 3:26 PM —
Death. Taxes. Microsoft Windows. No matter what the future may hold, at present you still can't avoid any of them. But there are ways to make Windows cooperate with Linux, and thus simplify our work lives until that legacy OS is no longer as ubiquitous as the Reaper or the taxman. In The Legacy Files, a new monthly LinuxWorld column, Richard Sharpe will show you how to integrate Linux and Windows and work around Windows' weak points. And if anyone knows how to beat death or taxes, be sure to tell us how in the forums. --Eds.
As I sat in front of a Windows system at a customer site recently, flustered while trying to fix a user's Internet access problem, I wished I could have access to the customer's Linux-based Internet gateway. I mean real access, with multiple xterms, not that pathetic excuse for a Telnet client Windows has. Once I had an xterm or two running on the server, I could quickly determine why the user could not access the Web. Perhaps Squid had died, or there were mistakes in the Access Control Lists in the Squid config file. Finding out from xterm would certainly be a whole heap easier than running back and forth between a user's PC and the computer room, or getting users to try things while I checked from the computer room.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that having xterm available from a Windows PC would be very useful at other times as well. When setting up new PCs, much of the work of giving new users access to a customer's Linux servers could be done right on the PC, if only it were possible to fire up xterms. We already had file access sorted out, as we were running Samba on the Linux server. But while Samba configuration can be performed with SWAT, there are problems with SWAT, and Samba troubleshooting would be so much easier if you could watch the daemons and check the log files at the same time that you were trying to access Samba.
With the current rapid acceptance of Linux by organizations of all sizes, there are many companies around the world with environments in which Windows and Linux must coexist. As a result, there are system administrators around the world who need to deal with problems like those I detailed above. The Legacy Files will explore ways to integrate Windows and Linux. Future articles will look at running Windows applications on your Linux desktop, printing in mixed Linux/Windows environments, network troubleshooting under both Windows and Linux, and other topics. Readers are welcome to suggest Windows and Linux integration interests of their own as well.
So, getting back to the problem at hand, there I was, fired up with the need to access the customer's Linux server from a Windows box. I set about finding ways to solve my problem, and quickly came up with several approaches that had promise, which I will explore in the following sections.
Xterms from Windows
Paul Simon had it almost right when he sang about "fifty ways to leave your lover!" When I searched using Google, it seemed as if there were nearly as many ways to access Linux. While there are any number of good Telnet clients for Windows, what I wanted was to run up xterms, as well as other X Window System applications, remotely from a Windows machine. My search turned up a number of X servers for Windows, along with one surprising alternative.
The X servers were MI/X from MicroImages, X-WinPro from Labtam Finland, and X-Win32 from StarNet Communications. You can download each of them from Tucows or from the Websites of their respective companies (see Resources for links). The cost of the products varies from $25 for MI/X to $200 for X-Win32, with X-WinPro coming in at $90.
The surprising solution was VNC, or Virtual Network Computing, from AT&T Laboratories in Cambridge, England (see Resources for a link). This product is very effective and freely available; it's another example of open source software at work.
