Spot the odd one out...

[Daz]

http://dwuk.net/misc/smug_outlook.png (500k)

[Burble]

I like

[Mark]

Wine or VM?

(looks like Wine to me as I didn't think VMWare 'did' Coherence yet. )

PS - I can do the same with my Mac & Parallels (if I could be bothered to install Outlook)

[Daz]

VM

rdesktop 1.5 with seamlessrdp. Works for anything I want (even ie if I need it, handy because wine isn't totally ok with 7 yet), running against the XP VM I keep as a backend to the 360 for pics/music/vids (sitting on an ext2 partition mounted straight in doze no less ). Home drive, and sound mapped back without issue Clipboard *should* be working but isnt, need to look into that but meh, it's not the most important thing.

Citrix-esque functionality basically, open source style.

Evolution just isnt quite there for me yet, and I quite like Outlook

Saw it on the ubuntu forums. If you ubuntu folks want to try it, then rdesktop 1.5 has packages in feisty. It's also in portage for the Gentoo folk, but masked.

[Mark]

You've totally confused me with your setup now. I don't know which bits are VM and which are remote desktop (if any).

Might have a look at unmasking the Gentoo package and giving it a try (although tbh there's not much benefit to that as I don't run X on my Gentoo box - I'm not a Linux GUI fan, strangely*)

* strange because I worked on *nix GUIs for several years. Maybe I got fed up with 'em.

[Daz]

Originally Posted by Mark

I don't know which bits are VM and which are remote desktop

Quite cool though, dont you think?

This is my home workstation/server. Ubuntu host (didn't fancy Gentoo this time, the box is beefy enough anyway), running vmware that has an XP Pro machine set to boot at startup (using the OEM license originally bought for that machine.... not sure if the EULA says anything about that ). In terms of interactive apps, for the most part they're native to the linux host (web browsing, image manipulation, an IDE etc). Now, for the odd Windows app I miss (well, Outlook being the exception, I use it every day), I can install it on the VM, and use rdesktop with seamlessrdp to simulate a Citrix published application (though it's not quite as swish as you'd expect). I have a shortcut to 'Outlook' in my KDE menu, which actually fires up rdesktop to the VM, calling seamlessrdp to start Outlook. Quick flash of a screen later and I have Outlook in front of me (sound, home drive and all) like it was running native to the *nix box.

Of course, because it's just a thin client rather than any sort of emulation, you can use it to run any Windows app (you can see in that thread the guy runs media player, cool, but I prefer Amarok anyway).

As a random aside, did you ever get Outlook 2003 to run with wine? I've tried it a few times but never with any success. I read that it is possible, but even the people that got it started had problems.

[Mark]

Nope. Haven't tried anything seriously big with Wine. If I were to do it now I'd go the VM route, same as you have. My box isn't beefy enough for that though. I recently recompiled my entire Gentoo install (took about a week) to make it Intel-safe, so that box might be the first for an upgrade.

[Dr. Z]

Is this approach better than cedega for running 3d things?

[Daz]

Not at all. It's just like running remote desktop as you normally would, no good for videos and games.

[Dr. Z]

Damn - videos would have been sweet because there are certain things that windows-based apps just do that I cant seem to be able to do on linux when it comes to video playback.

That and the fact that despite HOURS of trying, I just cant get my dual monitors set up acceptably Im running ubuntu in a vm at the moment, can it be done backwards? (Ubuntu apps served over RDP to my windows desktop?)