sixtyPercent: Cochlear Implants, Aviation, Technlology, and Philosophy 2005/05/04
Multi-computer-monitor setup
I'm faced with a bit of an embarrasment of riches -- I have two nice machines on my desk at work, as well as a fantastic Dell 2005FP 20" LCD panel. One computer is an IBM Thinkpad T43p, the other is an Apple iBook. The iBook is my personal computer, and I generally bring it everywhere with me and find it the most comfortable to use. The Thinkpad runs Ubuntu Linux 5.04, and is used for developement and system administration tasks. Though Mac OS X is "just" UNIX under the hood, I find the package management and system administration of Debian-style Linux to be more in sync with the way I develop and manage systems and web applications. Yes, I know that there are things like Fink to superimpose package management onto Mac OS X, but it's not the same as having an OS built around apt-get.
In any event, I need to fluidly move back and forth between these two environments. There are of serveral solutions to this, and I tried most -- two sets of keyboards and mice, KVM switches, VNC, x2vnc and so on, but I finally settled for the time being on NX / FreeNX, setup mostly as described here. NX is essentailly a terminal services implementation from NoMachine available also in open source form. So now my Thinkpad runs more or less closed -- just booted to the Linux console. My iBook connects to the 20" LCD panel and (with the help of this excellent hack) has a huge Mac OS X desktop. The NX client runs essentially full-screen on the 20" LCD and I have one keyboard and mouse to run it all. This seems the best of both worlds -- I can continue to "live" in Mac OS X which my fingers have memorized and which manages multiple monitors exceptionally well. If I move the mouse to the NX client window, I'm instantly "in" my Ubuntu GNOME desktop, happily developing away. The performance of NX is really very, very good.
To complete it all, I needed a good USB keyboard and mouse. The mouse part was easy -- it seems there are lots of decent models to choose from. But the keyboard aisle at my local Fry's is a distaster -- 30 different models, all junk. Most have crappy keys and 30 extra buttons, switches, levers, dials and wheels for "controlling the Internet and Music" bla bla. I just want that feels good and doesn't cost a lot! The a funny thing happened -- I went to the "Apple" section, and found the $29 Apple keyboard which was exactly right.
If this setup continues to work as well as I hope, I'll pass the Thinkpad along to a coworker, and substitue a beefier desktop PC for the Ubuntu developement host and NX server.
by David Creemer : 2005/05/04 : Categories technology : 0 trackbacks : 3 comments (permalink)
