Saturday, May 12, 2007

Running Sun Secure Global Desktop (a.k.a. Tarantella) on your Fedora Core desktop

I have spent hours trying to understand why the Tarantella client does not work on my GNOME install. Every time I run the ttwebtop command, I would see a whole lot of warnings on the console and the end result was that I would not be able to type in anything in the login dialog.

After a lot of Googling and reading bugs, I chanced upon the possibility of a mismatch in the location of the XKeysymDB file. This file is available as part of libX11 which is present on the system by default. The client tries to load up this file from the location /usr/openwin/lib/XKeysymDB, but the file is actually present at /usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB. In order for the application to pick it up, you need to define this new location as an environment variable - XKEYSYMDB. Once you set this variable, the client loads up fine, and I can start working from home again :-)

As a solution, I have this variable defined in my ~/.bashrc file as follows

export XKEYSYMDB=/usr/share/X11/XKeysymDB

And I can start working from home again :-)

Note: The client in consideration is the Sun Secure Global Desktop version 4.2