Re: need help choosing appropriate BSD distro

t2000kw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I might give in and give up on the Wine requirement for the laptop. I
mentioned in another post that I would only NEED it on the desktop. If
the desktop computer broke, I could boot to Windows on the laptop and
have my Agent email/newsgroup reader. Also my wife would not feel lost
if she needed to use my laptop if the desktop computer were broken.

To get away form Windows on the laptop, I might have to give up on
wanting to have Wine work on it, even in an OS it's made to support.
The hardware may just be too old. Someone else mentioned that it might
not have been compiled to support my older hardware. I installed it as
a binary, precompiled. I could compile it myself (haven't done much of
that) but Wine is strange, as you mention, and I don't know if it
would blow up things or work nicely after doing that.

One alternate solution that you might consider - depending on where and
when you use the laptop - is to tunnel the X11 connection.

X11 is a client/server application; applications ('X clients') tell X
what to draw, and the server draws it. This is, at least in theory,
network-transparent.

So you might want to give it a shot. There are several tutorials on
remote X out there; I seem to recall reading at least one at tldp.org.
If the network you are working on is untrusted - say, encrypted with
nothing stronger than WEP - you will most likely want to consider
setting up a VPN or just using ssh -X.

Note that setting up remote X, while not particularly difficult, is not
entirely painless either. And the result may or may not be unbearably
slow (the few times I tried it, it was tolerably slow).

If you've got a spare box to run Windows, you could run Agent and so on
that and use a similar solution - your pick of rdesktop (XP Pro/any
server edition, no idea about Vista) or tightvnc (any recent-ish
Windows) - to achieve pretty much the same effect.

Of course, finding free software alternatives to the Windows programs
you are still attached to, if possible, is the best solution.

Joachim
.

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