REVERT TO CONSOLE

I haven’t been comfortable with my work environment for the last couple of months that I’ve been working remotely. My remote office work involves connecting via VPN and making use of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection. The problem is with speed. I just cannot get used to the delay between hitting the key and seeing the results on the screen.

Remote Desktop works well for what it does, but it’s sending a lot of data back and forth rendering screens- all the little windows from the various applications I use- and that is what kills performance for me. I’ve been looking at a number of solutions but have not come up with one I’m comfortable with yet. Currently I’m doing my work on my laptop (the programming work), and remote in to check and send email, use the company portal, etc. It’s tolerable working in this manner, but it’s not technically allowed by the corporate policymakers; those wise, benevolent creatures…

I’ve been looking at using a Linux distribution as a solution. I could do all of my work remotely via ssh in this type of environment, and eliminate the Remote Desktop Connection all together.

I’ve looked at a number of different ways to do this. There are limitations of course; the number one limitation is that I’m stuck remoting in some manner into a Windows desktop! I could, for example, use a virtual environment to run a Linux distribution, or I could use cygwin so that the virtual environment would not be necessary.

I personally prefer the virtual environment, because I dislike converting paths and debugging dependencies in cygwin. But I’ve run into several issues with Virtual PC and network connections. I’ve only been able to get Fedora and Suse to work out of the box with the Virtual PC networking options, and I’m not comfortable adding new network drivers to other distributions. I’ve also tried, without success to use Qemu, and Parallels. The issue I had with both revolved around network configurations or drivers.

One drawback with a virtual environment is that it doesn’t allow the full use of my system resources (Windows still needs to be running whether I’m using it or not). However, the only option I’m aware of to remotely access my machine with cygwin would be to set up an ssh server on windows, and that isn’t particularly appealing to me either… it just sounds, I don’t know, like an oxymoron.

Oddly enough, accessing mail seems to be the most difficult task to perform via the command line. At this point I’m stuck with Outlook/Exchange/MAPI (again, benevolent corporate policymakers at work- these are the same creatures that would pay $240 million for a fad, I think), and I’m not sure what my options are for a command line client. Has anyone had success with the PC pine MAPI feature?