network transparent GTK apps

[Henry Gomersall <whg21 cam ac uk>]

Hi,

Firstly, I should give some context to the problem that I trying to
solve.

We have multiple machines in our room (its a shared student room and its
not just me working on this). One of the machines tends to act as a
media storage and playback device, with a projector connected to this
box (hence the display X session running on this machine). This machine
is also the most powerful one.

Networked to this are a couple of laptops, and potentially a Familiar
Linux PDA.

Up until now we have been controlling the media box from a laptop over
an ssh connection, setting the DISPLAY variable to display directly over
the GDM screen.

What I want to achieve is a method by which i can control the media box
from any of the other devices (including the PDA).

The architecture we are thinking of utilises some kind of generic
service-advertising/control daemon running on the media box. This is
capable of performing local commands and operations.

On a remote machine (laptop or PDA) exists a program that talks to the
media machine. The media machine forwards something like a glade XML
file to the remote machine which then renders it. At this point it all
becomes a little vague.

We sort of envisaged some kind of GTK binding to CORBA, such that the
signals emitted on the remote machine appear on the media machine to be
handled by the control daemon. Ideally this would be bidirectional, so
the media machine can update the widgets.

The reason for the interface been defined by the media machine is so
that new interfaces can be added as new services are required.

The biggest problem is trying to contort GTK to do as we wish. I have
little experience of the underlying GTK code or CORBA. Does anybody have
any idea how to implement something like this, or a better idea, or
knowledge of a prior implementation of something similar?

We would ideally like to use python and pygtk if possible for speed of
development.

Thanks in advance,

hen
-- 
Henry Gomersall

"digital" is proving to be a synonym for "crap" - El Reg