RE: NetBSD GUI practice and experience

["Terry Moore" <tmm%mcci.com@localhost>]

(Changed subject to match content)

> On Apr 27,  6:11pm, charles.cui1984%gmail.com@localhost (Charles Cui) wrote:
> -- Subject: Re: honor to join NetBSD community
>
> | 2. How do you work in netbsd, do you use GUI (like xwindow, or gnome)?
> | If so, which
> | do you recommend? I installed Xwindows several times, but seems have
> | some problems.
>
> It depends. Right now I am typing on OS/X using Xquartz connected to a
> NetBSD box via ssh a few miles away. I run X on NetBSD too, but my NetBSD
> laptop is old and heavy and runs hot :-)

I run NetBSD in a VM on my primary Windows laptop using VMware -- works
great. It's not "supported" by VMware, but I have very few problems. You
could probably use VMware Player for a free solution. I have not tried
VirtualBox. I only need 256M of RAM in the VM to do very large edit and
compile sessions (but I am not doing kernel builds, so I can't comment on
whether that would be enough memory for your work).  (In fact, I ran with
only 160M of RAM for many years.) Because it needs so little RAM for my
shell/edit/compile/transform workload, I don't notice that it's present. I
can't say that about the other VMs I have to run.

I have used XWin32 and Cygwin X to connect to a desktop manager running on
NetBSD; I've also used a desktop and xdm(1) (so I'm talking directly to an
XServer running on NetBSD through the VMware virtual console. I tend to
stick with remoting in with X because it's a little more convenient. 

Only significant headache with using X from the host desktop to a VM is that
the SSH/TCP connection tends to get torn down on hibernate/suspend. That
doesn't happen running with xdm, but with xdm you don't get cut/paste to the
host system, which I tend to use a lot. It's also noticeably slower than xdm
for some things, but for my use case, it's fine.

Best regards,
--Terry