dbus, hal over xdmcp?

[Nathan]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 4:14 AM, Anton Shterenlikht<mexas at bristol.ac.uk> wrote:
> no, that doesn't work either.
> I wonder if anybody has actually successfully used dbus with XDMCP.
> I know it should work, but maybe nobody has tried, so perhaps there
> are some issues.
>
> I have a user group of about 20 people, all under the university firewall,
> so insecurity of XDMCP is not a major concern.
> I was thinking of having a powerful XDMCP server as an energy efficient
> and easy to maintain model, since the desktops only need to have a good
> graphics card. If that is not working, then perhaps I have
> to switch to plain ssh tunneling, and have full X installation on all
> desktops.

I don't know anything about dbus or hal, but we're using a FreeBSD 7.2
server that we just used to connect 150 thin clients (peak load of
about 100 concurrently connected right now) to it over XDMCP to use
gnome.  The biggest trick was finding the magic config line to
configure xdm with (since gdm's xdmcp doesn't work).  After that, our
biggest problems are gnome specific. (gnome on freebsd doesn't handle
samba-mounted drives very well.  And we can't find a browser under
gnome on freebsd that doesn't crash a lot [firefox2, epiphany].  And
firefox3 is absolutely unusable [takes FIVE seconds to render a
drop-down box???])

~ Nathan