roKKin on Windows

Some of us are due to circumstances outside our control, missing our favourite 
audio player because we're stuck on an operating system it doesn't run on.  In 
my case, my laptop has an unsupported by X radeon video card that won't run at it's
best resolution in X.  And as much as I would rather run KDE, it's more of a 
shame to give up this gorgeous screen.  For the past while then, I've been 
running remote X logins to one of my workstations, and having the best of both
 worlds, all my favourite X apps, at all the resolution I can muster.  That left
 just one thing I couldn't do, use amaroK, because routing sound around the 
 network is quite a task.
 
So, below are a set of steps to get a local installation of amaroK running in
windows, using some freely available software. While this is in no way limited
to amaroK, it's an excellent example application for the task, and it's one that
is difficul to run remotely, so it's the one I am explaining.

Before you start:
You will need a computer, with a few Gb free disk space.

Software:

Xming (available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming ) Xming is a very
capable port of Xorg to Windows. It's quite standalone, doesn't require cygwin
or anything else installed, and can do both windowed applications as we're going
to do below, or full blown remote logins via XDMCP. You will want to grab the
fonts packs from the same place. Install it where you like, and add that
location to your path.

VMWare Player (available from http://www.vmware.com/products/player/) Freeware
player from VMWare that can run prebuilt "images" of operating systems.
	
An image of the operating system of your choice. There are plenty to download
from the VMWare site (their "Browser Appliance" is actually an ubuntu
installation, for instance) There are also a whole lot at
http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware I used the FreeBSD 6.1 image from there.

How much space an image will require varies, the one I used is set up for 5Gb.
If you don't have a distribution preference, you should probably try a few until
you find one that suits you. I am going to assume at this point that you are
familiar enough with the OS on the image you do choose, that you can install
amaroK on it yourself.

Putty (Available at http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ ) You
might as well grab pscp and plink while you're there. You'll not likely need the
rest of the tools for this task, but there is also an sftp client and an
ssh-agent

Once you have all the above downloaded, install the vmware player, and xming,
then unpack the vmware image into the location of your choice, and drop the
putty tools somewhere easy to type (or in your path)

Running the vmware player will ask you which image to run, so point it at the
one you unpacked. Here is where you need to make sure that the following are
available:

An sshd is running.  If it's not, turn it on. 

A user account (you dont' want to run amarok as root, even in a virtual machine,
it's a bad habit) Networking is available. The default is Nat, and it works fine
for this purpose. I just pointed mine at a dhcp server, set yours up as you
like.

Your sound card is being seen. Enable audio with the >> next to the Ethernet
label in the vmware player menu, it will stay enabled when you 'reboot' your
virtual machine, but you may need to make sure a driver is being loaded for it.
Amarok is actually installed. Install if it you need to, using your normal
method.

Once you have all the above, now is a good time to "reboot" your virtual
machine, and make sure the networking, sshd and audio come up as expected.

Now back to windows for a minute Run Xming as follows (assuming you installed to
the default location): 
"C:\Program Files\Xming\Xming.exe" :0 -clipboard -multiwindow" 

Or you know, edit the path as appropriate. The key here is "-multiwindow" which
will make xming not run a desktop window over the top of your windows desktop.
-clipboard lets you cut and paste between X windows and Windows windows.

You should now have an X icon in your system tray, and probably nothing else has
happened. When you have this working, put a shortcut to run the above command in
your startup folder.

And now for the fun part: run putty (it doesn't need installing, just run it
from where you downloaded it to.)

Putty's interface is a little obtuse, but it works like a champ. Put your vmware
machine's ip address in the top box on the front page, go to SSH -> X11 in the
menu on the left, and check the "Enable X11 Forwarding" box, go back to the
"Session" tab, and press save.

Now you can just run putty with the session name, and you'll have a login shell
on your vmware virtual machine run amarok from there (and/or anything else that
takes your fancy, and you are in business)

For amaroK itself, you'll probably want to turn off the system tray icon, and
the OSD transparency is... not very transparent. Also if you have an extended
desktop like I did, it took me two tries to realise that it was extending the
window across both of them (perhaps if i'd had both monitors on I'd have seen
that sooner.)

The volume is twitchy, you'll need to find the right combination of system
volume in windows, the volume in the virtual machine, and the volume in amarok

Performance is not spectacular. You'll probably need to play with nice values,
how much memory the virtual machine has available, and maybe the buffers for
your engine of choice. That said, I am writing this while compiling stuff in the
vmware machine, and amarok is only very occasionally skipping, and I haven't
done any kind of tuning on this configuration yet.

Summary (or "the short version")
Install a local copy of amarok (and everything it needs to run) in a vmware image
run Xming :0 -clipboard -multiwindow
run putty, turn on X11 forwarding, point it at your vmware image.
run amarok
listen (dancing is optional)

To explore further: You can probably do away with the putty window by doing something
like "start /b \\path\to\plink.exe -l youruser -pw yourpassword othermachine amarok" 
(plink is the commandline version of putty)