Dual screen Chromebox as a remote terminal to SaaS Virtual Machines.

My work desktop runs almost nothing: all my applications are served by an in-house ‘cloud’ of servers and virtual servers that live downstairs.

The GUI applications – email, irc, skype, development environments all get persistently and transparently pushed to which-ever ‘display’ i’m using – on the sofa, I use my x61 tablet, at my desk, I was using a dual screen mac-mini that i detested, and now, I’m beginning to set up a ChromeBox series 5 to do the same thing.

(yes, in developer mode, and with the root file system made read-write)

There are some developer type setup-tweaks I’ve had to make – most notably to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to increase the Virtual desktop size to accommodate the second screen.

Section "Screen"
    Identifier "DefaultScreen"
    Monitor    "DefaultMonitor"
    Device     "DefaultDevice"
    #ADDED by Sven for three headed chromeos
    SubSection "Display"
        Virtual 6000 2000
    EndSubSection
EndSection

and then I have a simple script to use xrandr and then ssh to X-Forward my 4 main xpra sessions to it.

chronos@localhost ~ $ more setup.sh #!/bin/sh
#http://cr-48.wikispaces.com/Disable+Power+Management
sudo initctl stop powerm
xrandr --output HDMI2 --right-of HDMI1 --rotate left ssh -Y sven@quiet ./attach_dev.sh

where attach_dev.sh looks like:

sven@quiet:~$ more attach_dev.sh 
#!/bin/sh

xpra attach :10 &
xpra attach :11 &
xpra attach :12 &
xpra attach :13 &

xfwm4

yup, I run a second X11 Window manager to allow me to re-position the applications that are X-Forwarded.

using xfwm4 means that I can roll up and down the chromeos browser windows – which are separate from the other X apps, and I can move the mouse to the other screen via a tiny hole in the chromeos windowmanager – there’s a gap down where the chromeos toolbar is.

this is really after only a few hours playing, so I’m sure there are many improvements that can be made.

 

Open source Private Cloud SaaS: VDI made simple

I just acquired some ‘new’ computers with 2 Dual Xeons, 32GB and 16GB RAM, and assorted disks.

My first thought was to use the 32GB one as my openstack testbed, and the other as a desktop, but soon after setting them both up with debian testing, I changed my mind.

Dell 690’s are much too noisy to be anywhere near me.

So I tossed my original desktop’s disk into the second one, and then put both of them downstairs, into the ‘server room’, and then set up xpra for rootless persistent X11 sessions. One session per app (browser, irc, email) and one session per project I work on.

Now, I have quiet up here…

Combining this with the rex Box work I was doing last month, and I’m going to have a really nice Software-as-a-Service setup,

for example:

  • rex SaaS:connect –name=”firefox”

would either connect to an existing xpra session by that name, or create a new vm, provision it, and connect to that.

but that code will have to wait, I’m working on the Foswiki 1.2.0 Wiki Applications wizard right now 🙂