gnomie

a silly linux/windows hack
or, "x2vnc's best friend"

What is it?
gnomie lets you click web links in Linux (or any Unix, really), and have them open in Internet Explorer on Windows (or whatever you default browser is on Windows).

Why?
I've waited for Mozilla to not suck for over a year, downloading new builds nightly, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen for another few months. (I remain optimistic). In the meantime, this hack took only about an hour, and it was fun to write.

How does it work?
You run the server part of gnomie on Windows, and then you go into gnome's control center and register HTTP URLs to spawn gnomie "%s", which connects to the server on Windows, and tells it to open the URL in IE. Most applications in gnome should use the provided spawn_url function, but some applications (especially when compiled without gnome support), allow you to specify the URL spawner actually. gnomie is known to work with:

• gnome -- set it up in the control center
• gaim -- aol instant messanger for unix (this is why I wrote gnomie ... friends kept sending me links which killed mozillal, or required plugins I hadn't installed)
• loserjabber -- livejournal client.

Security
Anybody that can connect to port 7775 (the default) on your windows machine can open URLs. It's expected that you control or trust all computers inside your private network.

URLs are opened via the Windows ShellExecute API, which could be problematic (I don't know Windows), so gnomie makes sure the thing trying to execute looks like a web address (m!^http://!) and whitespace is escaped.

Download!

• Both server and client: gnomie-1.0.tar.gz
• Server:
  gnomie-server.pl -- you'll need perl for windows to run this, and the Win32-API module. Install it as a service (if you know how), or put it in your startup folder with a shortcut that auto-minimizes or something.
• Client:
  gnomie -- put this in your path somewhere, make sure you chmod +x gnomie, and then setup your applications to use it. Also--- change the first line of this file to have your Windows machine's IP address.

License
GPL.

Enjoy!
Questions? Mail me: bradfitz@bradfitz.com