remotelauncherSpec

Summary

A graphical program launcher to launch X programs via X forwarding. The user just has to enter the name of the remote host and his credentials and then he can explore the Gnome menu of the remote host. After selecting one of the programs or typing a program name into an input widget he can press a button and this program gets executed on the remote machine and is displayed on the local machine via X forwarding over ssh.

Release Note

You no longer need to use the command line to do X forwarding so that this incredible feature gets accessible to lots of users who didn't even know that it exists.

Rationale

It's quite common today even for ordinary users to use a remote desktop in Windows environments. Altough X can run remote sessions and even display the windows of single programs running on a remote machine over a network these features are only accessible to users who are able to use a command line. For the ordinary user it must appear as if Ubuntu wasn't capable of displaying programs from a remote machine.

User stories

Rob is a marketing guy. During a meeting he realizes that he forgot to copy his presentation slides to the file server so that they are still on his office PC and he can't access them from his laptop. He starts remote-program-launcher on his laptop, connects with it to his office computer, selects his presentation program from the menu presented by remote-program-launcher and after it started he selects his presentation slide form the "recently used menu".

Assumptions

Design

Implementation

  • Python
  • Glade/GtkBuilder
  • ssh -X for redirection
  • scp for copying the menu definitions from the remote machine for inspection
  • Maybe expat

Test/Demo Plan

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec

remotelauncherSpec (last edited 2009-06-13 22:45:56 by dslb-088-066-088-036)