Re: running Gnome apps on an ssh session

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Hi Kenny:

Accessibility for remote GNOME apps is still on the roadmap.  Because 
the accessibility framework uses CORBA, it works in theory, but in 
practice, the bonobo-activation mechanism which GNOME uses to register 
with the at-spi registry is tied to localhost.  So the missing link is a 
remote bonobo-activation; once you have that, the rest should fall into 
place.

So it's a known issue that this doesn't work yet, but making it work, 
though it will require some new code, should not be a big effort.

Here are some technical details:

1) applications load an accessibility bridge at startup, and register 
with the accessibility registry (at-spi-registryd) via 
bonobo-activation.  Due to current limitations in bonobo-activation, 
this registry is per-user-host, not per-display.

2) the 'application instance' which is reported to the registry is 
network-transparent, i.e. it could be local or remote.  Once the 
registry, or an assistive technology, receives a reference to a remote 
application, it can communicate with it just as though it were local 
(though possibly more slowly).


- Bill