[X2go-dev] headless client with pyx2go

[Jörg Sawatzki]

Hey Dick,

thank you for your interest in pyx2go! First of all, let me say that
pyx2go is not an official library by the x2go developers - it was
basically just an experiment to see if I could integrate python with the
x2go stuff. It is a quite new project and it still contains bugs and
some things are missing (e.g. sound and printing). The sshfs things are
only implemented for demo purposes and need to be secured and tested for
production use.

> The application should have the following features:
> 
> 1. All parameters except for the password should come from a profile stored in the users home directory
> 2. The user should have the possibility to enter the password, the username and the server, where the username and the server should be retrieved from the profile
> 3. The client should support clientside printing as the x2go client
> 4. The home directory (or another directory) on the clientside should be mounted with fuse on the serverside
> 5. The client should start XMing with all appropriate parameters
> 6. It should be possible to start an application from the server side by starting a file. So if a file called test.doc exists and that file is started, MS-Word should start.
> 7. The profile should be maintained by a separate program (nice gui application)
All these points are definitely possible with python and pyx2go - just
running MS Word on a linux server could be tricky - do you want to proxy
Windows remote desktop sessions through x2go/nx? Or was it just a
confusing example and an OpenOffice.org instance starting up on a linux
box was meant? :)

> 
> We've got the demo.py running. However when it ends, the session is terminated correctly, but a thread remains active. Probably the thread should be joined with the mainprogram.
Thank you for the hint! That might be because either a sub process doesn't correctly terminate or some greenlet (thread) e.g. a forward tunnel hasn't 
terminated and blocks the app from exiting. I am going to have a look at
it tomorrow - but just to be sure: What revision are you using? The
latest from github, right?

> Could anyone help us with documentation on the use of fuse and the way commands are passed from client to server vice-versa? 
Well, what you mean is sshfs, isn't it? Basically it just mounts a
directory on a remote SSH host by using the SFTP subsystem that you
should already know through the "scp" command line utility and others.

On Debian based distros, you usually just need to apt-get install sshfs
and then mount something: sshfs dick at some.remote.host.nl /home/dick/mnt

You really don't need a deeper understanding of FUSE to use sshfs - but
if you are interested, there's plenty of python specific information in
the "Language Binding" section at http://fuse.sourceforge.net

I hope that helps for now - if you have further questions or need help
with coding I will be happy to assist you.

Jörg


> 
> Dick Kniep
> Lindix BV
> tel. 036-5215580
> mob. 06-50991858
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