Seamless Windows RDP
After a quick look at Sun’s free Global Remote Desktop product at work today I decided I’d look into it this evening. This allows applications to be exported from one OS to another. What’s the big deal? There isn’t one if you’ve ever used X windows, which is a client-server model by design and as such allows applications to be displayed on different machines, or even via SSH tunnels.
Windows has Remote Desktop, which is handy for remote admin or using a remote machine fully. However, if you want to run, say, Photoshop, then it’s not really much use. This is one thing that Sun’s product allows you to do.
I spoke with James about this a little and he suggested I check out Tao of Mac, which I did, and found Cendio’s SeamlessRDP project, which provides a custom Windows shell that allows just a single application to be exported, instead of the whole desktop. Really great stuff… if you’re running a version of Windows with a new enough version of Remote Desktop that also allows more than one concurrent user (i.e. Windows 2003 Server).
A few hacks further on and I was happily viewing notepad on my laptop, which was being run on my desktop PC running Windows XP. To take this one step further, here’s Photoshop CS2:
This confirms two things: SeamlessRDP (already available in rdesktop CVS) is awesome, and Photoshop was not designed to be run over a wireless RDP link. I doubt performance will be much better to a local Windows vmware image, either.
But still… this is cool stuff.
Tags: Computing