I was gone all weekend on a wonderful camping trip, hence the radio silence. Today I’m back in the saddle, and faced with an annoying situation with my home setup.
I’ve come to the conclusion ‘yawl’ just can’t cut it as a development host. I had no idea that Pentium 4 CPU’s were such garbage. A 2.26 ghz machine isn’t fast enough to do serious work in Eclipse.
Most of my development is done on ‘clipper’, but alas it’s a Windows machine (it can’t help it, it was born that way). I wanted to start fiddling with CONGO (v2.0) via Konqueror, and hit upon running up ye ole VNC viewer on ‘yawl’, and just ‘moving’ the Eclipse environment onto yawl’s desktop.
Lo, it worked remarkably well. Clipper’s monitor is powered down, and I have an Eclipse environment on my Linux KDE desktop, but actually powered by the Windows dual core laptop next to it. I could overlap a Konqueror browse window and flip between it normally, and keyboard interaction was snappy and useful.
It’s not quite like having a local Eclipse install, but it’s mighty close. It gives me a feel for what it’s like for folks having big vmware server installations, and other less fortunate folks dealing with the variety of RDP based solutions, and being able to just pop into an existing running machine and work with it directly.
Really though, I should have a faster desktop machine. Alas, that’ll have to wait, it’s pretty low on the budget tree nowadays. And, in case anyone is curious, that is in fact a snapshot of CONGO v2 running in a pure Java environment – screens and back end all running within a Tomcat server. Sure it looks identical to CONGO v1, but that’s by choice. Quick port to Struts + JSP, then enhance and refactor. Progress is being made.
