Terminal Software Switch

[Aleksey Tsalolikhin]

On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu> wrote:
>On Mon, 2 Oct 2000, Rick <wulf at righi.df.unibo.it> wrote:
>>
>> Hello, I got a Linux Pc farm of 80 PCs.
>> Using the hardware switch is really uncomfortable so I decided to search
>> for a proper software but I cannot find it anywhere.
>> I need a software which can allow me to open multiple windows on one
>> terminal like the screen GNU software does but I am not interested in
>> having a shell spawned. I am interested that every new window opened on my
>> console terminal spawns a ssh or telnet process to one machine of my Linux
>> cluster and i want t oswitch between one connactoin to another.
>> Does a software like this exist already in the Beowulf software ??
>> I Tryed to search for something like this but I did not find anything.
>> Could someone give me some hint about if such a thing exists within the
>> Beowulf project??
>> thank you a lot.
>
>I'm not exactly sure what you are looking for here; it's either
>something really trivial or something extremely complex.
>
>One can invoke an e.g. xterm with a shell command.  That shell command
>can be (e.g.) ssh b1 or ssh b2...  Alternatively, one can ssh b1 xterm,
>ssh b2 xterm...
>
>One can contruct an icon or GUI to spawn the xterms (by name) a variety
>of ways depending on your windowing system and pack them into a taskbar.
>Doing this by hand would be very tedious, but if you learn to edit stuff
>in e.g. .gnome/* by hand you can probably autogenerate a gnome-style
>launcher.
>
>Just one of many ways to create a more portable and general solution is
>to write a C application or perl-Gtk script with e.g.  glade with 80
>buttons (1-80) which exec xterms when pressed.  If you go this route you
>can choose to run the xterms locally (and execute ssh bX in the xterm)
>or ssh bX xterm (remotely execute the xterm on the bX host). 

Hi,

  I would like to take this a step further.

  Let's say I've started 20 xterms, each with an ssh session to a
(different) host. Can I bring one of these xterms to the foreground
by hostname?  

  E.g. I have xterm/ssh sessions to hosts: apple, banana, orange,
and tomato. :)  I'd like to run an app that will make a small window
pop up, I type "apple", (or "a", and have a name completion routine
fill out the rest), hit Enter, and voila, the xterm with the ssh
session to "apple" is brought from background or iconization to
foreground.

  With 30 different xterms open, this would be VERY handy.

  Has anybody else run into this already/solved it?

Best regards,
Aleksey.