On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 9:13 PM, Dr. Ed Morbius
<dredmorbius@gmail.com> wrote:
on 20:51 Wed 16 Feb, D G Teed (
donald.teed@gmail.com) wrote:
> Having lost KDE 3.5 in the squeeze update, and not being satisfied with the
> new KDE 4.* (frankly, I think it is very poorly designed), I am looking for
> a desktop
> which can stack running terminal sessions.
>
> Let's say I have 50 Konsole or gnome-terminal windows open, each to a
> different remote box. I want to click on the panel area and select one by
> name which is already open. I could do that in KDE 3.5. Firefox and other
> apps could do this too. How is this done in gnome or what options are there
> for managing many open sessions of something?
GNOME, or XFCE4. There's a window list by default (middle-mouse on
desktop, or <F11>). This is pinnable, and it's pretty easy to select
and walk through a set of windows quickly (though you can't, say,
text-search through a list of names, which would be sort of cool).
http://main.linuxfocus.org/~georges.t/menu.html
You might even find a "mouseless" tiling/tabing WM (e.g.: ionwm) to be
useful in this context. You can designate sections of your desktop to
specific apps, and stack up multiple instances of an app in one spot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_(window_manager)
Sadly, development on numerous good but older WMs has stagnated (ion's
in stasis since late 2009, WindowMaker's last upstream commits were in
2005).
I'd also suggest you look at your workflow if it requires you to keep 50
open remote shell sessions:
- Generally: scripting remote interactions.
- Use 'dsh' or other tools to run similar commands on multiple
systems.
- Manage systems via puppet, monit, etc., rather than interactively.
- Use the KDE Terminal / GNOME Terminal built-in multiplexing
features.
- Use another terminal multiplexer such as screen or tmux.
What are you doing that requires 50 terminal sessions? How do you plan
on managing this when your server count doubles? Increases by an order
of magnitude?
This is at a University, so each system is pretty much unique in purpose, packages, etc.
There are for example roughly 10 Solaris Sparc. One is financial system, another
library management, another an Oracle DB, another the student system, etc.
Most others are Linux. Two of those are cyrus mail servers, another two are MX,
then one moodle system, 5 different systems for Computer Science, one for
icecast streaming, lon-capa, and many specialized boxes, some for research grants, etc.
There are not really more than 2 of the same thing except when you get into the Math
Cluster, and usually I work on only one system from the cluster.
Anyway, this may be partially misunderstood. I'm not looking for a solution
to manage the remote systems. I'm not doing something on all 50 terminals
at once. But over the course of a few days, I end up having up to 50 terminals
open from work recently done, and it makes sense to use the terminal
sessions again.
I merely want to pick one terminal session that is already open to the system
I want to work on, if it exists. Likewise to pick from one of my web browser
windows from a stack of open windows. Thus, the stacking in KDE 3.5's
kicker was just the thing.
--Donald