Eureka!

[altivo]

As I type this, the Alpha's OpenVMS desktop is just a keypress away, on the same screen as the Linux desktop. It is possible after all, though the way I did it was inelegant. Now I know where the problem lies, and just have to find the clean solution to it.

Tomorrow, the blizzard, or so they say. We shall see.

And it's time for bed.

Comments

[schnee.livejournal.com]

I'm curious now - what was the problem? (And how did you solve it?)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It's been clear from early on that there's a problem getting the client and server handshake going between OpenVMS and Linux. It narrowed down to the Xauthority stuff, specifically the MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1. Though the two systems do understand one another once the xauth is set up properly, they don't manage to do it when first initializing through xdm. After a session is established, they are fine, but that becomes a chicken or the egg problem.

I finally succeeded by starting the X server on the Linux box with "-ac" to completely disable the authority checking. That's not elegant and has to be done with root privilege, so I need something better. It also leaves some big security loopholes in the Linux environment, though I'm not so worried about that since I'm on my own private LAN behind a couple of firewalls. The actual command looks something like this:

/usr/X11R6/bin/X :1 -ac -audit 1 -auth /var/gdm/:1.xauth -query asher vt8

(If you think that's verbose, you don't even want to think about what it would look like on OpenVMS itself...)

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK! Yeah, that's not quite so elegant indeed, but at least it Works For Now™, which is nothing to be sneezed at, either.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Go Al!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lohJ7oDCAAI