Re: OT: Questions about (buying and) using a laptop docking station
Hi there,
On Mon, 16 Mar 2020, rhkramer wrote:
(Aside: I need to get a docking station with a VGA output as I "run" the
laptop through a KVM switch and one of the computers connected to it has no
HDMI output, and the KVM switch itself has no HDMI input.)
I get the idea (or I am jumping to the conclusion?) that there is some
hardware in the docking station (like graphics and audio chips) which I'm
assuming would need to be supported by Buster.
Is that correct?
Any recommendations for a suitable docking station?
If I understand your use case I shouldn't have thought it's necessary
to buy any kind of docking station - and indeed there's no need to use
a KVM switch either.
Look into using remote X sessions. For example I'm running X on this
Raspberry Pi on my desk. The CPU in the Pi is rather feeble compared
to the i7 in one of my laptops, and so I use the laptop for some heavy
processing but most of the time I don't need it. I keep it in another
building on the site, where I sometimes do need it. The buildings are
all connected via Ethernet. The laptop permits the Pi to connect to
its X display. Using 'xvncviewer' running on the Pi, a window on the
screen connected to the Pi shows the display on the laptop screen, and
xvncviewer also connects the keyboard and pointing device as well. So
I can drive the laptop from my desk just like the laptop is on my
desk. Of course you'd probably do things a bit differently but the
principles are similar. There are several ways of doing it, and there
are several viewers like xvncviewer - I just happen to use that one
because I'm used to using it.
It's a bit of a fiddle to set up but well worth learning how to do it
so you can then do it all over the place. It's a little heavy on LAN
bandwidth. For connections over slow links I'd suggest Remote Desktop
might use less resources, but it's had a bad security press recently.
Security can be more of an issue with all these things than hardware
solutions like KVM switches and docking stations, but one consolation
is that you don't have to buy any hardware. :)
--
Kind regards,
Ged Haywood, BSc (1st hons), CEng, MIET, MRIN.
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