Grip is kewl as we all know but I recently bought a large number of CDs and was dutifully putting them in to the cd drive one by one to rip to mp3 ...

... However I have another 4 monitorless linux boxes sat in the corner used for testing and I wondered if it was possible to use Grip X forwarded to main pc so that I could have 5 Grip sessions open at the same time ?

Anyway, tried and failed, and never got round to really diagnosing why. Basically, it seemed that the forwarded Grip session was looking at the cd drive on the pc where is was displayed and not at the drive in the originating pc.

I don't particularly want to start writing scripts as the Grip interface is very good (and I'm lazy), is there any way to configure stuff so that I can use all boxes as a ripping factory from my main pc ?

Hmm, like you said, if actually running on the remote machine and just the display ssh'ed back, it should have seen the remote computers CD. Anyway, you can run vncserver on all the remote machines. It is probably installed, but you didn't list your distro, so can't be sure. When you connect to each machine using vncviewer, and start grip on each one.

RO

I'm running RH9 (on all boxes). I thought of vnc but because I use a NIS server and NFS home directories, it plays silly-buggers with the kde settings... and is less than an elegant solution :-)

This is one of those "Hmmm, it should work, I wonder why not ?" issues that can turn into a free-time black hole.

I _can_ shell script the rip process and just run remote consoles from each box but I like to properly check/edit the freecddb listings before I rip and Grip is v. good for that.

I sort of understand why it might not work, in the Grip config you point to the /dev/cdrom device and I can see that the forwarded session might look locally rather than locally (?!?) if you see what I mean.

Yep, I can see. If it were data CDs, you could simply create remote mount points to all our remote machines for their CD drives, but you don't mount music CDs. I don't know, but suspect that there is a way to define remote /dev's that programs locally can access. I've never tried, but another, more elegant solution.

RO

Ok, it was bugging me enough to post a thread which means it was bugging me enough to go and sort it out :-)

This is not an elegant solution and I wouldn't normally use the root account(s) in this way but I managed to get it working.

If I ssh to remote box and su to the appropriate user account, running Grip returns :-

***
X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication.
Gdk-ERROR **: X connection to localhost:10.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown)
***

If I ssh and use the root account, Grip runs but complains about the directory used for the .wav/.mp3/.m3u files.

I changed the directory on each Grip config (under the root accounts) to point to a common accessible directory (/mnt/stuff) and I can now run 5 seperate Grip sessions in one display.

So in theory it should work provided the ssh set-up and the device permissions are correct so that an ordinary user ssh session (same user) on each box can run Grip and rip. I seldom need to do more than one at a time so the root blag will do for me but I'd be interested if anyone got to the bottom of this.

Meanwhile ...

[ripper@blagger ripper] # ./enable_rip_factory
enabled !

:-)