How To Have KDE And Windows On The Same Desktop
Do you use Linux to perform certain tasks and Windows to perform others, switching over to each desktop when you need that “something” that the other operating system lacks? Or perhaps like me, you have a Linux computer set up as a Web server, firewall/router and a Windows computer as your work environment. Maybe you use a remote desktop software to administer your Linux desktop which most of the time is slow and laggy. Then setting up X11 forwarding from your Linux computer to your Windows computer is faster and integrated into your desktop. Here are the step by step instructions on how to achieve this with free software.
Things You Need:
1 computer running windows
1 computer running Linux with KDE installed
(I found that Gnome didn’t work as well as KDE did with this setup)
Linux Instructions:
1. Install sshd on your Linux computer.
2. You have to assign a static IP address to the Linux computer, if you don’t already have one.
3. Insure that the Linux computer accepts network connections from your windows computer; you can do this easily by installing firestarter firewall utility and configuring it to accept connections from your private network, i.e. 192.168.0.0/16
4. (Optional) stop the KDM or GDM login manager from running to save resources since we won’t be using XDMCP to log in remotely. i.e. add exit 0 to the second line in your /etc/init.d/”kdm or gdm” file.
5. Edit your ~/bash_profile and add
kicker &
kwin -replace &
if you stopped the log in manager then only add kwin & (without –replace).
Windows Instructions:
1. Download and install cygwin with the x11 package.
2. Run cygwin.bat once so it can set up your home directory.
3. Download putty.exe and save it to the c:\cygwin\ directory.
4. Open up the program putty.exe by double-clicking it. First, setup the connection info for your Linux computer in the IP address field and select SSH. In the Connection Category, find the Connection tree. In SSH, expand it and you will see the Tunnels window. Click "Enable X11 forwarding”. Set the default for X display to "localhost:0". Now, go back to Session and save this session with a name that you like.
5. Edit cygwin bash_profile located in the default directory of c:/cygwin/home/username and add
xwin -multiplemonitors -nodecoration -rootless for multiple monitors
xwin –nodecoration –rootless for a single monitor to the end of the file.
This file may look jumbled when you open it with notepad because of the unix carriage returns just put the text at the end of the last line and save.
6. Open up notepad and type
start /MIN c:\cygwin\cygwin.bat
sleep 4
start /MIN c:\cygwin\putty.exe –load “name you saved the session under in step 4” –l username –pw your linux password
An example would look like this
start /MIN c:\cygwin\putty.exe –load “x11session” –l jack –pw jackspassword
Save this as "All Files" type named x11.bat in c:\Documents and Settings\Your-user-name\Start Menu\Programs\Start Up\
Now whenever you start your Windows computer (don’t forget the Linux computer must be on) you will be greeted with your Windows and KDE taskbars running on one desktop.
*side note: You could use a utility like runhide.exe to hide the batch programs from the windows taskbar.