Working on UNIX through your laptop

Brad Elkin (be@us.ibm.com ), Senior Technical Consultant, IBM

Brad Elkin is a senior technical consultant for IBM eServer - AIX systems and Linux clusters, focusing primarily on Life Sciences applications. He provides support to ISVs for porting applications, problem determination, application performance tuning, and application benchmark design and execution. He holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Summary: I use cygwin to open up terminals from my Windows laptop to my IBM p270 workstation (running AIX 5.1 ML3) when I want to stay in the same windowing environment for both. The following procedure will work on any flavor of Unix that uses terminfo terminal descriptions.

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Date: 26 Jun 2003
Level: Intermediate
Activity: 110 views

Opening Terminals from Windows

cygwin terminals are of type "cygwin" which is not known to UNIX. To get a cygwin window to fully function, do the following (for example, vi works as expected):

Install cygwin on the Windows computer. There is a small setup.exe file that you need to download from http://cygwin.com/. Just click on the Install now link and it does the rest (you can choose packages or just accept the defaults). I do not use the cygwin X-server and do not recommend installing it.
After installing, start up a cygwin window. You can now telnet and ftp from this window into your Unix box. The default install creates a desktop icon to do this (looks like a vise around a green arrowhead). You will notice that, in a telnet session, Unix complains about not having a cygwin "term" definition.
Copy (binary ftp) the file /usr/share/terminfo/c/cygwin from your laptop into /usr/share/terminfo/c/cygwin on an AIX workstation. Other Unix flavors have similar directories for storing their terminfo definitions. If the location isn't obvious, try man terminfo. You need to be superuser for this. Set the cygwin file's user/group to bin/bin and permissions to 444 (uga=r), identical to the other terminfo entries.
You can add your Windows computer's hostname to your Unix .rhosts file.
In the future, after starting up a cygwin window, you can start an ssh or rsh session (rsh is ok if you are staying in your intranetwork) and the terminal type is recognized on your Unix box. You can have multiple cygwin windows open on your laptop without X-server overhead slowing down or obscuring your regular Windows environment.

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