If you are a linux/unix user, I guess you’re familiar
with the program screen. A program that lets you
run text-based apps in a virtual screen, and you can
attach and distach from this virtual screen without
disturbing the program. An excellent program to run
your applications on a server somewhere on the
internet, and you can use it from where ever you
want.

But…. what about graphical applications…. that’s
a different problem. There are programs like NX,
but that runs a complete desktop in a window,
in stead of just a window.

Well…. I came across a program that might offer
a solution. It’s called xpra (“X Persistent Remote Applications”)
It can be found at http://code.google.com/p/partiwm/wiki/xpra

Unfortunately it seems to be abandoned, since the
latest version is from November 2009. There seem
to be some bugs related to keyboard layouts with
‘dead-keys’, which is kinda annoying since I usually
use such a lay-out.

There seem also to be some issues related to the
status of the control/alt/shift keys.

I am testing this on a local setup now, but I am
thinking about doing some tests over the internet
later.


Installing the dependencies on Mandriva:

urpmi libxdamage-devel ocaml-lablgtk2-devel python-pyrex x11-server-xvfb libx11_6-devel libxtst6-devel libxcomposite1-devel python-gobject-devel pygtk2.0-devel

Installing the dependencies on ArchLinux:

pacman -S  libx11  libxtst libxcomposite libxdamage pygobject pygtk xorg-server-xvfb pyrex

Another note about running on ArchLinux: You have to open
the build script and change python to python2 (it ocuurs two times!)
Since ArchLinux is so modern it defaults to python3.

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