Fish without water

[sickpig]

Hate my new gig. Have to work on Windows as the corporate policy only allows windows to access internal resources. Hate the keyboard of surface book and all that metal. I am spoilt by the delicious Thinkpad touch and feel.

I have installed WSL to be able to use find and other gnu utils but I can't use xdg-open directly from the find results because its windows(death). I grep, head or tail to grab the right file and copy to /mnt/c/users/username/Downloads and then open it from Windows explorer.

I have to either learn cmd/powershell or get vncserver going in WSL so I can login to Debian goodeness from Windows/mordor.

Or quit stating inability to be productive using the shit tools provided.

Rant over.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

https://medium.com/@japheth.yates/the-complete-wsl2-gui-setup-2582828f4577?

EDIT: obviously use Debian instead of Ubuntu and use grml's zsh configuration (or perhaps fizsh) instead of oh-my-zsh.

[sickpig]

Thanks for the link.
Yup Debian is what I have installed. And WSL does not run systemd. So I need to kill services and start them again if needed from /etc/(init|init.d).
They have an archiac windows version which is capable of only running WSL1 and 4.4 Kernel.
The ports for vncserver - 590* don't open up in WSL1. I can't see them as open using ss -ntpul.
I need to investigate further. I hope I can get WSL1 to run gui Linux. Lets see.
I just leave that metallic piece of crap in office. Don't bring it home. Might have to do some research. What a torture.
Or I can ddns my Thinkpad's public ip and remote login from shitbook. I am admin on shitboot so I can pretty much do what I want on it. I just don't want to dual boot as I do not believe shitbook's hardware is fully compatible with Debian.

[sickpig]

We won!

Tried 3 approaches and I will document them here for folks who face similar predicament.

Approach 1 - WSL - was no go. It needs some different x-server. I naively thought that I will be able to run a vncserver and then from Windows run the vncviever and connect to the localhost to get graphial ui. Also WSL is pretty limited in what you can do, it does not even let you use ssh to open dynamic ports incase you want to run socks proxy. So WSL no go. One down.

Approach 2 - hypervisor. Installed Debian in a virtal machice. This option is feasible however the available resources are limited as windows is always running in the background. No joy.

Approach 3 - It was clear that I would need to use a DAAS. Here I had 2 options -

1. I can use my existing Thinkpad, put it behind a ddns to get a hostname to which I can connect from windows. However bandwidth of my home connection is not consistent.

2. Use a DAAS solution. This was the best option.

To make it work I had to :-

* From windows surface book fire up a Debian virtual machine
* create a dynamic reverse socks proxy via ssh into my DAAS. This is crucial as without the proxy I can not access their precious internal resources.
* sftp the backup of my apps .config to the DAAS
* Create a separate work profile in firefox in DAAS and configure it to use the ssh proxy.
* user syncthing to sync the work folder between windows and DAAS

Benefits -

* Get to work the way I am used to with all my keybinds, aliases, service units and tweaks.
* I can use my personal firefox profile to use internet without being monitored by their network. Now I can finally start to work.
* I do not have to lug the shitbook anywhere. I can access DAAS from any dumb terminal.
If the bitch boss says no to my setup I will cross him off my christmas presents list and quit on the spot

Still have not figured out how to replace shitbook's keyboard with Thinkpads. Not yet but I will get there.