Ulteo Virtual Desktop

Oddly enough a friend from work was just telling me about this today, only I didn’t get much chance to do anything even partially resembling research into it. It seems like an interesting application though and I will definitely check it out right away!

Could you point out how apps are installed inside the linux environment, please?
That is the good thing with andLinux you get a “normal” ubuntu with synaptic and are able to use the standard repositories.
Is this the same for alteo or does one depend on updates of the program?
thanks

I installed UlteoVD on my fastest pc, a P4DC with a 160 GB SATA and 512 MB RAM, which runs both WinXP fluently and Granular1 even more swiftly.
It installs OK but takes ages to run, and even then I checked my LAN several times, thinking it broke down while waiting.

I gave my wife a dual boot too, and a old laptop with puppy to do her banking, but no, she wants to stay with XP, it is so convenient, she says.

But her system runs on a slower Sempron2600 with a 250 GB PATA disk and 512 MB RAM, and with this lack of speed (to express it nicely) I will not be able to convince her to use Ulteo.

The idea and GUI are perfect, I think. Perhaps I just lack memory? That’s what the marketeers of Vista try to tell me too, primary reason to avoid Vista and switch to Mepis, Mint or Granular…

I tested it out on a Core2Duo T2300E with 2GB of DDR2 PC25400 ram running Windows XP. The installation was pretty speedy.. about half the time it takes to create a virtual install system. The boot-up time was also rather slow, but I figured that it was well worth the wait to be able to use linux and xp at the same time.

However, as soon as it started up it disconnected me from my wireless connection. I thought maybe I had just messed up and disconnected myself, but after numerous attempts to reconnect while it was running, I just ended up quitting it and restarting it. The second time around it worked great. However, the startup for programs was wayyy topo long. And I didn’t like the fact that the status bar was completely ignored. If something was running in the background, it left a taskbar notification like it was a window, only you couldn’t switch to it or start it up.

Eventually I just got sick of it and removed it. It realy wasn’t worth the frustration. Not to mention it refused to let me sudo anything.

Well, you can give a try to the version 1.0 of MokaFive’s Virtual Desktop Solution. It is a complete virtual desktop package. It aims to give IT administrators a centralized management system, and allows for the creation, deployment, securing, updating and managing of virtual desktops, which it calls ‘LivePCs’. You can check out the same at:
http://www.mokafive.com/

@Victor: Well, I’m still trying to figure that one out, too. Guess it’s just not possible atm.

@Angelo R: After some more testing and comparing it to andLinux, I’m still unsure which I like better - I’ll probably end up using andLinux since it offers ubuntu, ignoring it’s minor and major flaws.

@Trish: MokaFive is effectively VMWare Player with some portable wrappers - I just don’t like the installation and removal of kernel drivers on startup / exit, plus it’s just huge. When using portable virtualization, I recommend QEMU or MojoPac, depending on the needs. I’ll write some more about virtualization in general in the near future, so stay tuned ^^

[...] Windows es un pequeño software que me he conseguido navegando por algunos blogs (Download Squad y gHacks) y lleva como nombre Ulteo Virtual Desktop, o lo que es lo mismo un escritorio virtual que emula [...]

@Stefan I’m gonna check out andLinux.. I really do enjoy using linux more than windows XP, and I only keep it around because there are a few windows-only peripherals that I have. I used to dual-boot with ubuntu, and then openSuse and I’ve tried out a few other distro’s as well. I would love to be able to keep both running at the same time, which is why I was so excited to test out Ulteo.