Thursday, April 14, 2011

Letting go of old programs

As you may know I am a Mandriva user. More hardcore than I thought, I discovered today.
I am lucky because I have padawan now. Eager to learn but patient enough not to bug me all day long.
So the need was to log onto the desktop from remote. Not just access but use the desktop. Mandriva has this tool called rfbdrake. It provide a one stop interface for remote access, going to and setting up. Basically it calls on rdesktop to connect to Windows boxes, VNC for Linux boxes and uses rfb to share out the current desktop.  Not to be confused with the brilliant remote access tool on SuSe which spawns vncserver to provide remote desktop access from the point of login. This is much more pedestrian. Just share what I am seeing. Problem is, I couldn't find it on urpmi  or on the Software Installer. Now I had procrastinated over some time on fixing a problem that workstation which prevented some updates from being completed. Since both of my problem could be rpm related, I finally set aside some time to do it. The update problem was simple enough. Apparently, the Fortigate firewall triggered some false positives on the files that was being downloaded. So amending the rules slightly to allow the updates to pass thru did the trick. But in the process earlier, the various repositories were also messed up. So removed them all and redownloaded a new set. For good measure, I plunked in plf too.
But after all the updates, I still couldn't get rfbdrake. Time to hunt RPMs on the net then. But horrors, rpm.pbone.net was down. RPMFind was no good either. I had given up on it to find Mandriva RPMs a long time ago. So a hunting on google we go. I finally found it on (of all places) SUNET. Nostalgia engulfed me as I remember the old days of going through SUNET looking for free/shareware software. Then followed the ensuing dependency hell. I was missing rfb itself. Hunt as I may, I could only find one from 2008. Security-wise not good.
Then it dawned to me. I was asking the wrong question. Why was I hung up on rfbdrake? The question would be, what would give me desktop access? If rfb is gone, what are their replacements? I should have learned that I should let go of old programs. The new guys were Vino and krfb. Turns out they worked fine. I miss the unified interface but if it is for the better, why not.

P/S - I am still haunted by my failure to keep a copy of a DOS IVR program (that fit on a floppy!) that ran together with a voice modem (a 33.6kbp with voice capabilites). I am that old. *sigh*

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