Working remotely on a Raspberry Pi

I've been trying to do some real work on a Raspberry Pi and it's cramped my style a little bit to cannibalize a monitor and slap an extra keyboard an mouse on my desk.

Working in Raspian Wheezy, you have a lot of Debian Linux at your disposal, so I thought, "I'll just ssh in" That works great, from either a Linux VM, or using Putty on Windows. I needed to run graphical applications and spawn terminals at will, so I really wanted full desktop experience.

X11, the base graphic interface run by virtually all Unix-like operating systems, supports a feature known as display redirection. I used this back in the 90's when I tried to make use of a boat anchor DECstation from my Slackware Linux box. It still pretty much works the same way it did 20 years ago. Before I get too far into how it works, I'm just going to stop and and mention that if all you want is to remotely run graphical programs on your Rasberry Pi, stop right there!  There is a much easier way! X11's server-client model is very powerful and flexible, and is unique in a class of technologies that has stood the test of time, but it's not very "get'er done" user friendly.

Linux machines support Microsoft's "Remote Desktop" protocol with two programs: xrdp and rdesktop.

xrdp is the "Remote Server". This runs on the machine that your want to remotely log into. Note that is this backward from X11, where the "server" is the machine with the physical display, and the client is the (remote) application that generates contents to display.

To install xrdp on your Pi (if using Raspian or other Debian Linux derivative), type:

sudo apt-get update

then

sudo apt-get install xrdp

You're pal apt will download, setup, and launch the xrdp deamon to start listing for connection requests. If you're parnoid, reboot your Pi to make sure.

RAM disks and page files.

I've run across some bad information on the Internet more than a few times lately, and it prompted me to try to counter this misinformation about optimizing workstation computers with gobs of RAM.

The tl;dr version is: leave your RAM alone, let the operating system manage it. Teams of people smarter than you and I have figured this problem out.

The Problem:

The advice is basically that emulating a hard-drive/ssd with system RAM will speed up your system, and that moving your paging file to the RAM Disk can improve system performance. That is just wrong. Why does this idea never seem to die the death it deserves? I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of what a page file is. There seems to be this idea that the reason a PC is running slow is because it's spending too much time writing to the paging file. 

How paging files work.

All modern desktop operating systems support the idea of a paging file. In short, a page file is the operating system's way allowing programs to ask for more RAM than what actually exists. In the old days, when RAM was used up, the operating system simply returned an error when a program asked for more memory. The purpose of a page file is not to speed up a computer, it is to allow your drivers and applications to have access to more memory than is actually available on the system. Indirectly, a paging scheme can make available more RAM for other uses, which does lead to high performance. 

Mental experiment: a femto computer: