Paul Howard –

As scary as it may seem, back in the late eighties I used to be a programmer. Luckily after a few years of coding for a living I realised that I was not a bad programmer. I was awful, and so moved into the world of hardware, and then later software, support.

Recently, though, I have found that I want to accomplish certain tasks and there just aren’t the tools available for what I need. A good example is a bit of software that Microsoft supplies (I think it is a snap in for MMC but cannot for the life of me find a link to it right now) that allows you to connect to multiple Terminal Services sessions inside on app/windows. Very hand if, like me, you have to manage multiple Windows servers.

The problem is I don’t run Windows on my desktop PC. I run Ubuntu Linux and although there are many ways of connecting to a Terminal Server (rdesktop, tsclient) there doesn’t appear to be a way of connecting to multiple Terminal Server connections in one application, all in one switchable window.

The nearest application to what I need is Vinagre which does exactly what I need but only for VNC connections.

So the plan is to kill two birds, as it were, with one stone. I intend to get back into coding some basic applications as well as writing an application that fills a gap in my work flow.

Having not done any coding at all for the last fifteen odd years I took a look around and it seems the easiest way for me to accomplish this is to use Gambas. In the words of the Gambas website: “Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, a bit like Visual Basic (but it is NOT a clone !).”

As I learn the basics of Gambas I hope to post a few updates as well as any source code I create. Anything that ends up being release worthy will be released under the GPL.

This should prove interesting.