Hosted development workstation

Introduction

• The purpose of this workstation is to provide a complete and defined setup for developers, to ease the learning curve and to produce quick results.
• We also use this workstation to give the testers a defined working environment.
• This workstation is currently hosted on a Jiffybox in Germany (domainfactory).
• Please understand that we cannot give access to everyone. We will only give access to people we know and trust. Please contact Timotheus if you want to get access.
• If you want to setup a similar workstation yourself, please visit Setting up the hosted developer workstation

Remote Desktop with X2Go

We are using the X2Go project for remoting the Ubuntu desktop to your machine (Linux, Windows, Mac are supported).

• Recommended by Timotheus: See http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:x2goclient for download and installation instructions
• Alternatively, there is another client, a wxPython based system tray applet: http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:pyhoca-gui

Please use these settings:

• Host: workstation01.solidcharity.com
• Login: this will be your username
• SSH Port: 22
• Session Type: please choose LXDE instead of KDE (LXDE requires less resources and allows more users at the same time depending on RAM available)
• you can also change other settings, eg. the fullscreen display

The empty desktop will look like this:

Some useful programs are:

• Konsole: to get a command line
• Konversation: an IRC client for taking part in the OpenPetra chat at freenode.
• Geany: a text editor that is powerful and easy to use
• File Manager
• Chromium Webbrowser and Firefox Webbrowser
• MonoDevelop: IDE for C# development
• Bazaar Explorer: GUI for working with Bazaar code repositories
• pgAdmin3: work with your PostgreSQL database

In the default configuration on Windows, X2Go does not support Alt-Tab for the remote session, to switch between applications on the remote desktop. See this post x2go client – getting Alt+Tab to work! Basically, modify the settings of the XServer, to the options: -rootless -notrayicon -clipboard -keyhook. Be careful on German Windows systems, to set the path for vcxsrv.exe correctly, eg. C:\Programme\x2goclient\VcXsrv\vcxsrv.exe. The default path is wrong, and you cannot start the x2go client anymore, until you fix the setting in the registry (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Obviously Nice\x2goclient\settings)!

Configuring your user account

login script

It is recommended to add the following lines to your ~/.bash_rc script:

# manually added to be run for every terminal session
if [ -f .ssh/id_rsa ]
then
   eval `/usr/bin/ssh-agent`
   ssh-add
fi
. /opt/mono/env.sh

This script will set the path variable to use the latest mono and nant for OpenPetra development.

If you have stored a private ssh key in .ssh/id_rsa, this will load the ssh key with every terminal session.

Launchpad

You need to get an account on Launchpad, which is a service provided by the company Canonical, who develop Ubuntu and Bazaar: https://login.launchpad.net/+new_account

Alternatively, you can also download a zip file from Github or use the nightly developers zip file, from Sourceforge