Very latest: The admin giveth, and the admin taketh away. Evilwm is gone, but to be fair it's small enough to keep a copy in your home directory. Still got Firefox though - I'm waiting until 1.0 is released (Nov 9th?) before I bug the helpdesk again. At that point I'll get round to revising this page properly.
Latest: Having mentioned to Chris Tilbury that what the machines really needed was 1) evilwm and 2) firefox, both said applications are now available in A0.01. This means they are just about the only computers in the university to do so. :) Thanks, Chris.
These are just some things I've worked out can be done in A0.01, the new Maths Linux computer room at Warwick. Some of them might need your computer at home to be running Linux, but then it should be anyway.
I've just noticed something amusing - all these Linux computers have a 'Designed for Microsoft® Windows® XP' sticker on them.
Something else amusing is the number of people who come in here, try to log on, can't (because they need to update their logon scripts) so give up and walk into the Windows NT room next door.
By this, I mean being able to use applications on another computer, while the graphics are displayed on the one you're using. For example, you can check your e-mails on your computer at home using your graphical e-mail client, just like you normally would.
For this, you almost certainly need to be running a UNIX-based system (i.e. Linux). Get the ssh server set up, and make sure you know your IP address. You also need to make sure that certain options are set in /etc/ssh/sshd_config - you need to have 'X11Forwarding yes' and probably 'X11DisplayOffset 10' in there, near the end.
You can then go to the maths computers, open a terminal, and enter the command:
ssh -X user@hostip
And provided I haven't forgotten any obvious other configuration I did when I tried this, it should work. Enter 'xclock &' at the prompt to be sure.
Interestingly, this isn't limited to the Linux computers - you can get the same effect on the Windows ones using Exceed in passive mode, and PuTTy. In the tradition of maths lecturers for decades, I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.
It turns out that ogg123 is installed on these new computers. This means that you can use ssh to access any Ogg Vorbis encoded music you have at home, and play it in the Maths room. :)
Before you leave your room, you have to make sure that sshd is running, and make a note of your ip address. Then issue the following command:
ssh user@host 'cat path/to/music/file.ogg' | ogg123 -
And you can annoy everyone trying to revise in term 3.
For mp3s, there's no player I can find that plays them from standard input. All is not lost, however; a utility called artscat is also helpfully installed. This can play wav files from standard input. All you have to do is get your player at home to play a file as wav on standard output. Thus:
ssh user@host 'mpg321 -w - path/to/file.mp3' | artscat
Of course, you can play more than one file at a time by using wildcards, e.g. music/artist/album/* will play a whole album. You could also use artscat to play ogg files, but that would take more bandwidth and be slightly more unreliable.
Of course, it's awkward having to play those files from the command line - as 1337 as it makes you look, you're forever forgetting to escape spaces and stuff. We need a gui.
After some experimentation, I've got xmms working over ssh. This might not be the best way, but I can't be bothered to set up a streaming ogg vorbis server tonight. The first step is to get X forwarding working, and to start xmms from the command line.
Next, you create a pipe in your home directory, called pipe1, by running the command (on your home machine):
mkfifo pipe1
You then switch the xmms output plugin to the OSS drivers, and choose the alternate device of ~/pipe1. You can now click 'play' in xmms. One further command is necessary; you need to get the pipe data over to the maths computer.
ssh user@host 'cat pipe1' | artscat
This is not an ideal solution, for several reasons:
EsounD, the Enlightenment Sound Daemon, is able to send sound over networks very easily. The Esd plugin is probably already in xmms, so it makes sense to use it.
There are three parts to getting this to work:
In the xmms preferences (on your home computer, over ssh), choose the esound plugin. Click 'configure', and choose 'Use remote host'. The defaults should be 'localhost' and '16001' for the host name and port number.
Execute this on the maths computer:
ssh -R 16001:localhost:16001 user@host
On the maths computer: you may have to kill an existing sound daemon (killall esd). Then run:
esd -tcp
The -tcp flag makes the daemon listen for tcp connections. Easy! You may have to restart this daemon every time you stop playing anything though - if I find out why, I'll tell you.
So now you have mp3 and ogg playback through a GUI, over the network (through ssh). Oh the joys of Linux!
Incredibly, it doesn't stop there. You can also send video over the network, using xine.
Perform stages 2 and 3 above to get sound working, and then run the following:
xine -A esd path/to/file.avi
Obviously the format doesn't matter, so long as xine can play it. It should, however, be reasonably small - xine started to complain when I tried to play a movie over the network! My video of Bill Gates being embarassed when Windows 98 crashed on live TV worked fine enough, however. :)
Evilwm is a cool, lightweight window manager. I use it at home, and KDE in A0.01 is just too user-friendly for me.
Just recently, evilwm has been installed properly for everyone to enjoy, making these instructions much simpler. To get evilwm working, do the following:
This works, but you may well also want to change a few options...
XTerm*scrollBar: false XTerm*Background: black XTerm*Foreground: white XTerm*pointerColor: white