VMware View on the $99 HP Touchpad

Last month, being the quintessential geek that I am, I spent the greater part of one of my weekends installing the Ubuntu Chroot on the HP Touchpad and blogging about it.  Since then I got thinking, why couldn't I just grab the VMware View Open Client and install that into Ubuntu and essentially run a View desktop on my Touchpad, which brings us to this post.  Although its not running directly on webOS its still kind of cool and thought it deserved a few words…but, since a picture is worth a thousand words I'll show you the proof first.

There you have it, a fully functional Windows 7 desktop from VMware View running on the Ubuntu Chroot on the HP Touchpad.  Now, before getting too excited please remember that obviously none of this is supported with VMware or HP.  I did it just becuase I wanted to see if I could.  Mind you I couldn't get the VMware View open client to compile on the Ubuntu Chroot.  It kept complaining about the Arm processor and not having 'Thumb' support.  So, if anyone knows how to do recompile the open client on an arm processor please leave a comment below and let me know.  The packages that I installed to recompile the open view client were libgtk2.0-0 libgtk2.0-dev libglib2.0-0 libglib2.0-dev libxml2 libxml2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev intltool libboost-dev boost libboost-all-dev build-essential.  I used the Open View client found here and followed the instructions to recompile here.  

But like I said, I had no luck with the recompile so I had to cheat somewhat in getting the client up and running.  So, if you haven't installed the Ubuntu Chroot, do so by following whatever set of instructions you want to do that, mine are here.  Basically, I just downloaded the HP ThinPro add-on package of their ThinPro software, extracted out the View client Debian package, copied it to the Touchpad and simply ran the following command.

I can't remember if there were any dependencies that I needed to get, you may have to remove your current rdesktop install first.  A message will be displayed if you need to get and/or remove anything, if so, just use the sudo apt-get install/remove commands to get whatever you need.   Anyways, after installing, simply drop to a terminal from within Ubuntu and run vmware-view and your client should fire right up.

To tell you the truth, the performance is really not that bad.  I thought that it may have some sort of downfalls running on a Chrooted Ubuntu along side with webOS, but it was actually pretty snappy.  

Again, this is definitely not supported, and to tell you the truth, it will drain your Touchpad battery very very fast, so it probably isn't very practical either, but just like the Ubuntu Install, it was fun and I thought I would share….