That’s Yellowtail to You

So I decided to give Hamachi a whirl on good ol’ gutsy–I think I’ll abbreviate that GOG–and it took some doing.  Hamachi is a neat app that creates a virtual private network–that’s VPN to you acronymoholics–with other computers on your network.  What can you do with said VPN?  Well, for one thing, you can access the files you have at home when you’re out and about.  You can also do a VNC or remote desktop session.  While I found this to work, it was less than ideal since my upstream speed at home is very slow and is probably being hammered by Mozy trying to suck 50GBs or so of data through a coffee-stirrer-sized data pipe.  Man, I wish I was in Korea or Japan…anyway.

To get Hamachi working, I had to use the following tip:

[SOLVED] Can’t log in to Hamachi – Ubuntu Forums

While I found the whole thing very helpful, I wish that the folks who give help would explain how they tracked these issues down in the first place.  What the heck is “upx” and why did I have to use it on the hamachi executable?  Also, I found that putting hamachi and ghamachi into the  /usr/bin folder made them behave proper.  Why?  I’m not 100% sure but I figure that’s where executables should go.  Anyway, I’m off to google upx and /usr/bin to see what’s up there.

Remote Desktop – Ubuntu

The fact of the matter is that my server that does all of my backup and that sort of goodness runs on Vista. It also houses my budget spreadsheet so I need to get to it on a regular basis. I tried gnome-rdp but it keeps telling me that it’s unable to find my desktop. I’ve been looking around and think I need to try something called rdesktop (according to this anyway).

I suppose that’s the fun part about Linux. I mean RDP has been around for ages in the Microsoft world (they called it Terminal Server before) and it’s pretty much standardized there. You could use VNC or other protocols to get into another PC remotely, but it’s usually easier to just use Windows’ built in RDC app. After using Parallels on Hongyun’s Macbook and enjoyed the coherence mode that makes Windows apps look like they are native mac apps. I’m hoping I can find something similar to this for Ubuntu.