Crazy idea with Ubuntu, OpenSSH & WinXP
 

I just got an interesting idea, and would like to see what other people think about it. I've been trying to convince my boss for a while to let me switch the computers in our office from the ever buggy WinXP to Linux. He likes the idea, but his main objection is that we cannot run MS. Access and Quickbooks in Linux. I've looked into using alternatives such as OpenOffice, and I've also checked out Crossover Office. Nether solutions seem suitable for our situation.

Just this week on my Ubuntu laptop, I discovered the wonderful world of OpenSSH, and with it the ability to run programs on another computer but use them over the network. I know that there is a version of OpenSSH ported for windows on sourceforge.net, and I have played around with it a bit. I was thinking that perhaps I could convince my boss to run one fast computer with XP installed along with OpenSSH, MS. Access and a few other WinXP programs, and forward the GUI over the network to Linux boxes, like one can do between two Linux computers. I've searched on Google for this, but so far cannot find it. Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions or know where I could look for more info? Thanks for your help.


crashsystems

The problem is that "Windows" are not "X-Windows" so you can't really forward an XP GUI the way you can a Linux GUI. Also XP is not really designed to be a "server".

Having said that you CAN use vnc to attach to the windows box and run it from your Linux workstation. That doesn't eliminate the Windows box though. You might want to look at something like wine to actually run the MS-Office apps on your Linux workstations. You'd still have a copy of those apps on each workstation but your underlying OS would be Linux.

I agree. Also have you tried gnucash. I heard it is very simaiar to quickbooks and quicken.

I've already tried wine, and was not able to get it to work for the programs that we want to use. I understand the part about Windows not using X, but I thought that perhaps there was a way to forward the WinXP program display to some program on Linux that could emulate the Windows GUI. I've thought about using VNC (I already use it for many other things), but the problem with that is each Linux box will need to be running its own instance of the MS software.

In responce to jstephens84: If we were starting from scratch with ourdata, then gnucash might work, but we already have a QuickBooks file with over five years of transaction data on it. Do you know if gnucash can use the existing data?

crashsystems

You can import most formats with gnucash, I know for a fact you can import Quicken files but I am not positive about Quickbooks. Somebody Else here might have gnucash installed and can check.

Once not too long ago, I had the chance to witness a piece of software called CITRIX in action. CITRIX provides an SSH like alternative to Windows systems using a web interface. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the CITRIX server can talk to any client operating system. I don't know how much CITRIX costs, but it may be worth a look.
http://www.citrix.com/

Even with citrix AFAIK you would still need to run XP server to accomplish your goals. Using a terminal server you can set up thin clients using just about any linux version with rdesktop or ica. Not sure what that you save you in time and money. Googling didn't pop up anything that would convert quickbooks to gnucash without a lot of problems and didn't appear to be successful.

Make sure you investigate the licensing issues. Linux is nice and open, but the Windows folks and their application partners might not take too well to you buying one copy of their OS/program and then sharing it with a whole mess of people over a network.

Windows is slow enough as it is. I can't imagine a desktop XP install would be able to handle serving up large apps to a bunch of people.

I'm planning on having an XP box running as an application server. Citrix sounds interesting (I've seen it before and remember liking it), but I would prefer something open source, and my users do not need access to the whole desktop, but only individual programs. Does anyone know of a pice of open source server software that will let me host individual apps over a network?

crashsystems

Unfortunately, I'm not aware of an open source application. As previously posted XP desktop is not designed to do what you want.

I have done something similar using Windows 2000 terminal server setup as an application server. That allowed me to connect a linux client using rdesktop to the terminal server and the user was able to run the apps they need. Just make sure each app is able to have more than one user at a time if that is needed. The terminal server can handle it however the app may not.

I almost forgot, I once installed the Sun Secure Global Desktop server on a Windows machine. It had similar capabilities to CITRIX, but it used a java based client. That was a long time ago and I can't find much information on it anymore, but I found this on Sun's website:

http://www.sun.com/download/index.js...tion%20Servers

Quickbook and Windows using Virtualbox (or VMWare)
 

I've started setting up all the clients I service on Ubuntu using VirtualBox to run their Windows programs. Some simply run windows inside the VirtualBox while the other more adventurous ones are running windows and linux side by side. This allows me to create a simple point to restore from, and all their data (mydocuments folders, and etc.) I've managed to save outside of windows in the linux system. If anything happens to windows I just hit the reset on VirtualBox and everything is like new again. I've converted quite a few people from using windows to using VirtualBox. The nice thing is that you can strip down windows, not have any anti-virus, or spyware scanners or anything so windows is as fast as it can be, and I've run this on a p4 3.6Ghz 1.5gb ram just fine as long as you aren't having too many crazy things running at the same time.

Man I hate quickbooks and Intuit though, and all the small businesses in America are trained to use this program. Their customer service sucks and their common answer is "You can't do that, and we won't be implementing that EVER! Now give us your money."