Tips to work remotely from Windows

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Why and who?

This intends to be a small quickstart guide for facilitating teleworking for users (like me) whose only machine at home is, somehow regretably, a Windows-based one that does not have all the fancy tools that we have at our workplace. I have omitted TeamViewer on purpose, as setting it up requires to have physical access to the lab PC (but it is really useful for visualization purposes, too).

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

In Windows 10, it is possible to install the WSL to have a Linux terminal available inside W10 (with better integration than other options such as Cygwin!).

The guide by Microsoft on how to install this wonderful feature is at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

(Just need to run a PowerShell command, restart and install the WSL for the desired Linux distribution - probably Ubuntu, indeed - through the Microsoft Store)

Inside the WSL, applications can be installed with apt almost just like in a normal Ubuntu installation.

The contents of Windows drives can be accessed via the route /mnt/c/... to copy/paste files. Doing it in reverse (WSL filesystem from Windows Explorer) is possible but absolutely not recommended, as this could break the Linux subsystem if we modify any file (don’t do it).

The WSL in principle is a text-only device, but it is possible to install a X-Windows manager to use graphical applications. I followed the instructions in the following page http://mdr78.github.io/2019/07/01/windows-spacemacs-install.html. This is (obviously) a tutorial to install the (very good) text editor Spacemacs, but does also include the required instructions to get the XWindows working: basically, installing the XMing manager and its associated XMing-fonts. These are available in http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/ or in SourceForge if you prefer. Once these two packages are installed, for every session we need to:

- Have XMing initialized (appears in the taskbar!)
- In the WSL session, run export DISPLAY=:0.0 (add it to .bashrc or alias it if you don’t want to write it each and every time). With this set up, our WSL terminal shall be able to open the graphical applications that we have installed almost like if we were in Ubuntu.

Mounting lab computer filesystem

It is possible to access your /home/ directory at your computer at ICIQ directly as if it was a disk unit mounted in Windows. To do that:

Create the tunnel with a ssh command. In Win10, this can be done in a PowerShell window with the same command that will be employed in Linux:

ssh -p2004 ICIQ_USERNAME@betelgeuse.iciq.es -L 7777:IP_ICIQ_COMPUTER:22

(or, also, in PuTTY, MobaXterm, the WSL, Cygwin, or wherever you want to). The 7777 port is where you mount the tunnel in your local machine, which will be accessed later - if you prefer other number for some reason this could be changed.

Mount the filesystem with sshfs. Unfortunately, this is not native to Windows, but can be easily included through https://github.com/billziss-gh/sshfs-win, installing two packages: WinFSP and sshfs-win. When these packages are in our system and the tunnel is open, the system can be mounted in a PowerShell or cmd window by:

net use X: \\sshfs\YOUR_USERNAME@localhost!7777

so now the /home/ folder is available as a disk unit X:

Getting ChemDraw

There is an available license of ChemDraw for all the URV community, in case you need to have it in your local machine. To access this, you need to go on http://sitelicense.cambridgesoft.com/sitelicense.cfm?sid=426, insert a valid URV mail address and follow instructions

By Diego Garay go back to Main Page, Group Pages, Carles Bo and Group, Núria López and Group, Scripts_for_VASP