Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I want more portability in my computing environment.

No, I don't mean a laptop, though I very much want one of those as well. (Actually I have a hand-me-down laptop with Windows 3.1 and a broken pointing device, that I think I can make useful as a text-mode Linux box once I get around to setting up a PPP server on my LAN so that I can boot an installation diskette and then install Linux over the serial port. But a machine that could run Acrobat Reader, xv, gv, and any of the several graphical web browsers I can stand (I'm picky, but not too picky -- Firefox, Safari, or iCab would be acceptable for on-the-road use if Opera doesn't fit) would be rather noticeably useful. But I digress.) ...

No, what I mean is portability of whatever I'm in the middle of (and to some extent, simply what tools are available) from one workstation in the house to another. If I'm in bed, I want to be able to say, "I feel like working on that stuff I had open on the NT box," without having to get up and move to the office to do so. If I'm at my desk, I want to be able to decide to finish a LiveJournal comment I'd started composing on the Macintosh. Or to be able to say, "This machine is too bogged down; I'd like to transfer one or two of these currently-running apps to a different desktop where they'll run faster, without losing my place."

Creative use of VNC could almost sortakinda solve a lot of this problem uh, fulfill this desire, except for a few snags: most of the machines in question are underpowered, so adding another layer to the GUI (and schlepping the mouse movements and window-updates back and forth across my LAN isn't going to speed things up; most of my screens are too small as it is; sticking a virtualized copy of another machine's screen into a smaller monitor is ... uncomfortable; and I'd have to deal with breaking and re-establishing VNC connections a lot to avoid loops where one machine has a twice-virtualized copy of itself in a window on its own screen (or having VNC error out and tell me it won't do that, when I try to grab a screen). I don't know whether upgrading from a 10Mbit LAN to 100Mbit would help any; I suspect the bottlenecks for VNC are in my processors, not my network.

Now if I ran everything on really fast servers that were only accessed via VNC (much as all my Linux boxes are currently only accessed by Telnet and X except when I'm shutting them down or rebooting them) -- that is, if all the workstations in the house were used as nothing but thin-client terminals -- that would solve the looping problem and the processor speed problem, but I'd need a fast application server or two to put downstairs first. Come to think of it, it'd also solve the "I want to have Windows, Mac Classic, OS X, Linux, BSD, and AmigaDOS all on one screen and have it magically behave like the one I'm thinking of whenever I try to do something" problem. But it doesn't solve the screen real-estate problem. And unless the hypothetical fast app servers were really loaded up with RAM, the "doing too much on one machine" problem would still exist. But I dunno, it might get me close enough.

I want a meta-OS. One that ties all the machines on my LAN into one huge system that lets me move from workstation to workstation willy-nilly, independent of how it moves processes from CPU to CPU for load balancing, and lets me copy from a browser window under MacOS and paste into a spreadsheet under Windows, reading my mind to figure out which of the possibly conflicting behaviours I want it to exhibit from moment to moment.

(And I still want the Bat-Computer, as previously mentioned.)

I'm wondering how close to this I can come. And how close with existing (preferably open-source or freeware) tools.