mig5.net

Update: So I just discovered that the installation of Ulteo wiped out my Apache default vhost config in sites-enabled.. which was serving other stuff on my machine. Be very, very careful, as I don't see this in the documentation anywhere...

I've installed Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop on my home Debian server to check it out.. I read about Ulteo quite some time ago, when Gaël Duval announced the project after being sacked by Mandriva. Essentially it is a virtualisation solution, but differs from others in that the virtualised desktop runs inside a browser window.

So I'm running the Session Manager and Application Server combined on one Debian 5.0 Lenny machine with no problems (though I'm not doing anything too crazy complex, and I understand Debian isn't fully supported due to an issue with a missing kernel module for CIFS).

I installed using the instructions for the more supported Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy LTS here, and I had no problems! The only thing to note is that I had to comment out 'bind_address = 127.0.0.1' in MySQL's my.cnf, as otherwise setting the database settings post-installation time, failed. Didn't trip me up too bad, this is often the cause of a problem when Apache's not listening on localhost only etc and you're executing the commands from a separate machine in browser.

And of course, to view the desktop within the browser, the Sun Java plugin for firefox was required.

The product is great, a truly amazing thing to see the virtual Linux desktop running inside my Firefox browser. The administrative interface is quite straightforward, and a lot of detail has gone into it. Often graphical interfaces that call background programs fall short of fantastic, i.e installing an application works well but removing doesn't (or there's no option, etc).. Ulteo's developers have put a lot of thought and effort into making sure things work as they should.

Neat that you can hook user accounts up with LDAP/AD.. that's a fantastic feature. Too many great applications are lacking LDAP support. Nonetheless I am just playing around so I used the 'Internal' solution.

The one beef I had with this product is that I couldn't get a terminal emulator to work.. none are installed by default, naturally, and everywhere I've read indicates this is a 'security' issue and so terminals don't work.

I installed Terminator, Gnome-terminal and XFce4-terminal, and whilst all these installed perfectly, everytime I doubleclicked the icon for each application on the desktop, the window spawned would exit immediately. Very frustrating.. there seems to be a logic here that desktop business users are the target users, and so a terminal is of no use. Sure, I'm a sysadmin and maybe not the demographic, but I do use mutt, and I need an ssh client to access other servers. And of course, sometimes one needs to grep and awk about in that massive log or SQL dump.

I installed konsole and xterm but these wouldn't even appear in the list of applications or on the desktop, despite also installing successfully! A bit weird.

Finally I got bored, and I created a simple shell script to launch xterm. I dropped this file onto the desktop and called it 'Terminal'. Right-clicked it and allowed it to be executable. Magic! I double-clicked it, and Xterm started. Finally!!

(Update.. I'm stupid, and an easier way to get Konsole to show up, since it wasn't in the applications list or automatically added to the desktop as a shortcut, was to create a launcher manually that called Konsole directly. Works fine. Go figure. )

I'm not sure if I found a loophole security-wise, and I filed a bug report / feature request just in case (and to point out that it either should work more smoothly, or if they don't want it to, don't let it work at all. Better yet, this is opensource, and the sysadmin installing the servers should get the choice regarding security! Especially with the fantastic layer of access control in Ulteo (users or groups can be allocated access to applications and not others) )

I'll eat my words! Buried deep in the General configuration under the 'Sessions' tab, there is a combobox 'User can use a console in the session?' Which is defaulted to 'no. I changed it to 'Yes' and now Terminator works.

Wow! Doesn't explain why konsole and xterm can get around it though..

There are a few other interesting aspects of Ulteo I want to delve into.. such as how the virtualisation works (I can see the chrooted environment is in /opt/ulteo/).. interesting also how the shell, when I spawned it, executes some commands almost as though they aren't in the chroot such as uptime and ps / top showing the host-level processes and not the guest. Though maybe I am putting too much Xen/VMware mindframe into this).

So, more to come!