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Showing posts from December 1, 2010

A screen-like command for X applications

The screen command has been very useful for running programs on remote machines because you can detach the sessions and log out of the remote machine and the application is still running remotely. It would be nice to do that with a graphical application since you can connect to a remote graphical application via X or VNC or similar applications, any graphical application terminates when you close the session. That's changed with xpra . Connecting to an X server (the special Xvfb server, basically an X server minus any video drivers so it can run on a headless computer -- yes, X with no video card) as a compositing window manager on the remote computer allowing you to log in later (even from a third computer), re-attach the session and the program is still running. The parent project that includes xpra is partiwm , a tiling window manager. The current version of xpra has many enhancements from the version originally reported here. Compiling and Installing on Mandriv