Sleepless client on Linux server without graphical interface

[RudKohler]

Is it possible to run Collanos as a "sleepless client" on a linux server that is operated without a graphical interface, i.e. on a web server that can be accessed only through a remote ssh access?

Thank you very much for a quick feed-back!

Rudolf

[Franco Dal Molin]

Hello Rudolf

The idea of having a "GUI-less" Workplace running somewhere on a server, possibly only accessible with a text based command interface, it good. Technically this could be done, I am pretty sure, with some tweaks to the system. The question is how far to take this "No GUI" philosophy.

Today we start-up everything at once, and our "foundation" is the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) using the Eclipse plug-in architecture. Theoretically, we should be able to re-architect the system in such a way, to start only the "core" components, and make the whole GUI part an optional subsystem, and possibly it could even be started (switched on and off) from the command interface in ad-hoc manner. While this sounds relatively simple and even fun to do, we would need a lot of time for it, depending how "clean" of a concept that should be. We would not only have to isolate all the system components from each other, but make sure that all needed user interactions become available in the command line interface. Many preferences and settings are in property files already today, but we would have to make sure those are all easily editable, plus make sure that the user can not corrupt the system with typos etc. We would have to create a lot of extra documentation for this. Also, the command line interface could grow to a rather complex interface itself.

So, the question is, how far should this go. A simple hack allowing you to switch off the GUI and bring it back when needed using a command line interface is one thing. Adding a few simple commands to start and close the GUI-less Workplace, would also be reasonably simple to do. But to implement a fully command-line based Workplace, is something that we should research and question. I mean, nowadays even large server software systems all come with graphical system management consoles. Maybe the GUI could be run remotely, or we could make it accessible via a simplified Web-browser interface. Such strategies would give us all new options.

At the moment we have no free capacity to work on this topic. We have a backlog of "big" feature requests, from calendar, to search, to OS folder sync, to contact management, as well as dozens of smaller ideas. In any case, I have created an issue in our feature tracking tool for "Running WP without GUI", but it will be difficult to address it soon. Please understand that we must permanently work with relative priorities based on a number of criteria, including frequency of user feature requests.