So you are at the office and you badly need Linux as badly as Windows. Linux hosts the cross compiler and the tool chain for your project, while Windows keeps you in synch with the rest of the company.Dual boot is, of course, the way NOT to go. From my experience you end by using just one system. Beside that Fedora Core 5 support for NTFS is, to put it mildly, rough. You can read NTFS partition, but you cannot write, despite all the claims you find on Linux-Ntfs website. If you are incoscien… ehm, brave enough you can even try a captive NTFS driver that is supposed to wrap windows NTFS drivers. These drivers are pre-built for Fedora Core 4 and I wasn’t able to get things working on FC5. I actually have some work to do rather than playing with the OS.
Another option I haven’t tried (yet), but that friends tell me is working well is to use VMware. This is a system virtualization software that runs below one or more operating systems letting them believe they are alone.
Anyway having two PCs is always preferred, it is just annoying that you need two keyboards, two mice, and it becomes quite difficult at copy’n’pasting between the two.
Until this morning.
This morning, while sneaking over Freshmeat I found x2vnc a nice hack that, using the VNC system allows you to share the same keyboard and mouse with two PCs, one running Linux and the other running Windows, as it would be one dual headed system.
Now when I move the mouse pointer over the left edge of the Linux machine, the pointer “flows” into the Windows screen. Move it over the right edge of the Windows screen … et voila, it’s back to Linux. It even works fine when the Windows system is at the login screen (i.e. no user has yet logged in). It is so sweet that Copy’n’Paste works, too.
Great Hack.