On 5/27/2011 10:34 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > >>>> If you are using Centos as a desktop, you'll probably want to upgrade >>>> to 6.0 at the first opportunity which should get you up to T-bird 3.1.x >>>> with a matching thunderbird-ligntening in EPEL. Still need the >>>> exchange connector, though. >>> >>> We'll go up to 6, or, more likely, 6.1, but we've just got a couple of >>> test machines running RHEL 6 and 6.1; upgrading to that will be a Big >>> Deal >>> - there's some apps that are, let us be polite, seem to be pretty damn >>> fragile.... And most of our researchers and affiliates (or whatever the >>> right name for the developers is) have CentOS workstations, though >>> development's done on the servers. >> >> There is always the magic of X for a remote window (native or >> ssh-tunneled) for when you want an application to appear on your desktop >> even though you don't run it locally or you need a different version >> from elsewhere. Shouldn't be that hard to make one RH box run an app for >> everyone. > > I think you missed the point - they run CentOS on their workstations, and > are X'ing to the servers. If their own workstation ain't showing, they > don't see nuttin'. Yes, I am missing some point. If you run X you can run anything from anywhere else in a window pretty much transparently. Why can't you add accounts for everyone on the RH 6.1 box (probably doing authentication against your windows domain since everyone with exchange mail must have an account there already), maintain the exchange connector there and give everyone a launcher that will open it on their desktop? You can get the effect with 'ssh -Y remote_host thunderbird' from an open terminal window without any other setup, but you'd probably want to give others a nice launcher and you may or may not need the ssh layer. As a side effect you get shared-memory efficiency for every instance of the application running on the same server. If you want something slightly more extreme, you could build freenx for the RH box and run whole desktops there although I don't know how many users you can put on one box unless most of their apps are remote. Personally I prefer NX/freenx to using a local console but that doesn't change your ability to also have applications remote from the desktop. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com