Linux desktops configuration

Linux access to MS Windows applications

Author: L.S.Lowe. File: linuxwinapps. This update: 20030924. Part of Guide to the Local System.

Access to Windows applications

An ICA client is normally installed as part of our local Linux setup. This allows you to call up our Windows Terminal Server machine in order to run applications such as MS Word and MS PowerPoint. This Terminal Server machine is equipped with Citrix Metaframe software, which uses the ICA protocol to talk to other machines including unix/linux machines.

We have two Windows Terminal Server machines, but the second is currently simply a backup and will only be in use when upgrades are being applied to the primary one.

Starting a session

To start a Windows session, click on the WTS or ICA icon on your Front Panel.

If you haven't configured that yet, use Start -> Search -> wts, (or on older systems, Start -> Bham Tools -> wts), and login in the same way as you login to any Windows NT machine in our PHYSICS-PPD domain. You can configure the icon later (see previous section for Add Application).

Alternatively, from a command prompt, you can enter wts to start a session, or ica to get a window which allows connections to be configured and defaults set.

Finishing a session

When you finish your session, do so by using Start -> Logoff -> OK. Wait for the window to close in its own time: closing it yourself while in the logging off state may result in a hung session next time you log in to the Windows Terminal Server. (LSL can clear such hung sessions).

Alternatively, you can disconnect from a session, which you can later resume. This relies on the Windows Terminal Server itself not being rebooted in the meanwhile, so don't rely on it for anything apart from a short period, and, as usual, always save your work first. Then use Start -> Disconnect -> OK, or click on the Close button of the session's window. Logging off if you have finished is better than disconnecting: it frees resources for others and it is always clear to the administrator (LSL) whether or not the machine is free for development.

File Access

By default, the following associations are set up for you during your session:

Drive Corresponding directory Status
disk A: the client machine's /mnt/floppy directory Read/Write
disk B: the client machine's /mnt/cdrom directory* Read/Only
disk C: the host machine's C disk Read/Mostly
disk D: the host machine's D disk Read/Only
disk H: the client machine's $HOME directory Read/Only*
disk M: the client machine's $HOME/Mail directory Read/Wquery*
disk T: the client machine's /tmp directory Read/Write
disk W: the client machine's $HOME/win directory Read/Write

Items marked * apply to wts initialisations after 10/1/2002.

It makes sense therefore for you to setup a $HOME/win directory and put your local Windows documents in some subdirectory of this, OR, use soft links in that win directory to link to other directories of yours. This will save a lot of hunting around starting from your $HOME directory which becomes tedious if your $HOME directory is like mine!

Notice that the new preferred setting for the H drive is your home directory in read-only mode. This is so as to limit the effects of user errors, viruses or other attacks. Files accessed via the W drive (for example) are read/write, so this is the best place to keep files you want to be able to change.

Floppy disks and CDROMs should be first mounted in the Linux system; they will then be visible to the Windows Terminal Server and so available via the A or B drive. Likewise, they should be unmounted before physical removal. The easiest way of doing this is to right-click the corresponding icon on your Linux Desktop and choose Mount or Unmount as appropriate.

How to save your work

It's important to save your work regularly when using the Windows Terminal Server. Your W drive is recommended (see above) as this is disk storage separate to the terminal server machine itself. If you save it on the windows desktop, you run the risk of it disappearing if you do not logout between saving it and the machine next rebooting, unless you are very careful when you next login to choose the local version of the windows profile.

When saving work, such as a presentation, be sure to save it regularly under different dated names, so you can return to a particular recent version if something goes horribly wrong.

Cutting and pasting between Linux and Windows

Sometimes you just want to copy a small amount of information from Linux to Windows, or vice-versa. You can do this using the copy/paste facilities in the normal way for each of those operating systems, in the corresponding window.

So to copy some text from Linux to Windows, first select the text from the Linux window with mouse button 1 (left). Then paste it into the appropriate place in the WTS window either using Control/V, or using mouse button 3 (right) and choosing Paste.

To copy some text from Windows to Linux, first select the text in the WTS window with mouse button 1 (left) and then either type Control/C, or use mouse button 3 (right) and choose Copy. Then paste it into place in the Linux window using mouse button 2.

Personalising your wts/ica configuration

To personalise your wts/ica configuration, if you really need to, invoke the ica facility, and click on Option -> Settings, and then select a window pane using the top-left button which gives you a drop-down menu. For example, to add or change the status of a drive mapping, select Drive Mapping from the drop-down menu.

To allow your session to login automatically under your id, invoke the ica facility, and click on Entry -> Properties, and then click on the top-left button and choose Login from the drop-down menu. Then type in your Windows userid, Windows domain (PHYSICS-PPD), and Windows password, and then click OK.

Resetting your wts/ica configuration to the default

You can reset your wts/ica configuration to the (latest) default by invoking wts -i or ica -i from a $ prompt.

Copying slides from a PDF to a PowerPoint presentation

This is included here but maybe should be somewhere else in a general Windows help section, as it doesn't really just apply to the windows terminal server.

  • METHOD 1
    • View the PDF with ordinary acrobat Reader.
    • Press ctl/L, or use Windows -> FullScreen
    • Press the PrintScreen key (that's Fn F11 on a dell laptop)
    • Press ESC to come out of adobe Reader fullscreen
    • In powerpoint empty slide, type Ctl/V, or right click and Paste.
  • METHOD 2
    • Start GSView (maybe under Ghostscript) and File->open the PDF file
    • in GSView on the slide you want, type ctl/C or Use Edit -> Copy
    • In powerpoint empty slide, type ctl/V, or right click and Paste.
  • METHOD 3 (useful for copying part of a slide)
    • View the PDF with ordinary acrobat Reader
    • In Tools menu, choose Select & Zoom -> Snapshot Tool
    • To select an area, hold down left mouse button and drag the mouse
    • In powerpoint empty slide, type Ctl/V, or right click and Paste.
  • As with Method 1 or 2, use image corner/handles to re-size or re-orient the image. Or, right-click and choose Size and Position, and using the up/down arrow keys next to the Scale Height, adjust the size to fit.
  • If you are going to copy and paste a number of images, you will probably want to reduce the number of re-size operations you need to do. Method 1 is inflexible in this respect, but methods 2 and 3 allow you to pre-size the source image to a size suitable for your powerpoint session.
  • All of these methods just copy a selection from a PDF into the new powerpoint presentation, and you can't edit the text. To be able to edit the text on a slide, and to be generally more flexible, you have to go back to the original PPT file from which the PDF was derived.

Also see ...

Also see the section Windows Desktops for some useful information on customising your Windows-Profile.

L.S.Lowe