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  • Remote desktop Debian -> ChromeBook

    From Nicolas George@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 18 23:20:01 2024
    Hi.

    I want to display a desktop and applications running on a Debian box on
    the screen and keyboard of a ChromeBook. Over LAN+WLAN mostly, but if it
    can also work more remotely in degraded mode it would be nice.

    I see various options to try: VNC with a native Android client, VNC with
    a client running in the Linux sandbox, x2go in the sandbox, Xpra in the sandbox, etc.

    Would perchance somebody here have already investigated a similar need
    and be able to tell which solutions are the most promising in terms of reliability and user experience.

    If not, I will post my findings eventually.

    Thanks in advance.

    --
    Nicolas George

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  • From Nicolas George@21:1/5 to All on Fri Jul 19 00:10:01 2024
    Xiyue Deng (12024-07-18):
    I have been using Chrome Remote Desktop[1] for a few years, and it has
    been very reliable. Everything is handled through a web page so you
    need not install anything in the Android subsystem. Recently (about a
    year actually) it added support for pipewire so sound handling is also seamless now.

    Thanks. But it looks that it has the traffic going through Google's
    servers, which is absolutely not an option for me. I definitely want
    something local and entirely under my control. Even better if the
    Android client comes from F-Droid.

    Regards,

    --
    Nicolas George

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  • From Paul van der Vlis@21:1/5 to All on Fri Jul 19 01:50:01 2024
    Op 18-07-2024 om 23:20 schreef Nicolas George:
    Hi.

    I want to display a desktop and applications running on a Debian box on
    the screen and keyboard of a ChromeBook. Over LAN+WLAN mostly, but if it
    can also work more remotely in degraded mode it would be nice.

    I see various options to try: VNC with a native Android client, VNC with
    a client running in the Linux sandbox, x2go in the sandbox, Xpra in the sandbox, etc.

    Would perchance somebody here have already investigated a similar need
    and be able to tell which solutions are the most promising in terms of reliability and user experience.

    If not, I will post my findings eventually.

    I use VNC and a SSH-tunnel to do remote-desktop between Debian and
    Debian. I use a server (my server) for the connection, but peer-to-peer
    is also possible. And a VPN instead of a SSH-tunnel.

    Some ASCII art:
    client <--ssh--> myserver <--ssh--> me

    On the client side, I use "tigervnc-scraping-server" and a SSH tunnel to
    my server. A 3 line script on the client initiates the connection

    On myserver the SSH tunnel from the client logs in without a password or
    key, but I use "nologin" as shell. You could also use a key.

    I use Remmina to connect to myserver, I guess this is not available for
    a Chromebook, but there will be another VNC client what can connect to "localhost:5900" using a SSH-tunnel.

    Copy/paste does not work in VNC. (For that reason I also have another connection method: SSH using the same server).

    I have it a long time working, and it works fine.

    With regards,
    Paul






    --
    Paul van der Vlis Linux systeembeheer Groningen
    https://vandervlis.nl

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  • From Anssi Saari@21:1/5 to Nicolas George on Fri Jul 19 14:40:01 2024
    Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> writes:

    Would perchance somebody here have already investigated a similar need
    and be able to tell which solutions are the most promising in terms of reliability and user experience.

    I've mostly used VNC and x2go for Windows-to-Linux and Linux-to-Linux.

    VNC was and is:
    - Solid and we actually use it at work too.
    - Limited in the number of mouse buttons at some point to five, minor
    but annoying. At the time I was used to 7.
    - In VNC you run a desktop in the remote end so that needs to be
    configured and maintained. I'm not a fan of this since it's usually
    just a small handful of apps I want to run.

    x2go was:
    - Slow to connect.
    - Reconnects from another machine were a hit or miss, mostly miss.
    So it really wasn't "screen for GUI apps" although that would've
    been useful.
    - Keyboard mappings via xmodmap were sometimes ignored.
    - It didn't have the mouse button limitation of VNC.
    - It has a mode where it presents a list of apps on the remote machine
    so don't need to setup a desktop, can just start the app you want.

    I don't know if my little gripes about x2go are valid today, I now use
    it occasionally from Windows to Linux. Certainly the connection is slow
    to form even in a LAN.

    xpra I've tried some years ago but the documentation wasn't very clear
    to me. Especially how to resume a session. Haven't looked in a while.

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  • From Greg Wooledge@21:1/5 to Anssi Saari on Fri Jul 19 15:20:01 2024
    On Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 15:33:40 +0300, Anssi Saari wrote:
    I've mostly used VNC and x2go for Windows-to-Linux and Linux-to-Linux.

    VNC was and is:
    - Solid and we actually use it at work too.
    - Limited in the number of mouse buttons at some point to five, minor
    but annoying. At the time I was used to 7.
    - In VNC you run a desktop in the remote end so that needs to be
    configured and maintained. I'm not a fan of this since it's usually
    just a small handful of apps I want to run.

    You don't *have* to run a full desktop on the remote end. You can run
    a smaller, lighter set of applications if that suits your needs.

    At work, I maintain a set of VNC sessions on Linux workstations for remote Windows users to use. The workstations themselves have KDE installed,
    and if someone's sitting locally in front of the machine, they can login
    and use KDE, with all of its bells and whistles. But for the VNC sessions,
    I use fvwm, with a customized menu, and a set of programs that get launched
    at session start.

    In my experience, the Windows users have been able to adjust to this
    quite easily. After they were told how to open the menu from the
    "background", everything else was intuitive.

    The only difficult thing was getting copy/paste to work. I did this by installing the "autocutsel" package on the workstations, and adding

    autocutsel -fork

    to the ~/.vnc/xstartup scripts. Then I added crontabs to launch the VNC sessions at boot time. Each user is "assigned" to a specific VNC session, which is launched with a resolution customized for their monitor(s). If
    they change their monitors and need the VNC session to run at a different resolution, they contact me, and I work with them to get it changed. (In theory they could ssh into the workstation and do it all themselves, if
    they knew how.)

    It's been working well for us.

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  • From Nicolas George@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jul 22 11:50:01 2024
    Nicolas George (12024-07-18):
    I want to display a desktop and applications running on a Debian box on
    the screen and keyboard of a ChromeBook. Over LAN+WLAN mostly, but if it
    can also work more remotely in degraded mode it would be nice.

    I see various options to try: VNC with a native Android client, VNC with
    a client running in the Linux sandbox, x2go in the sandbox, Xpra in the sandbox, etc.

    Would perchance somebody here have already investigated a similar need
    and be able to tell which solutions are the most promising in terms of reliability and user experience.

    Thanks everybody for your suggestions.

    I was hoping some insight about the client side too, especially the user comfort, but it was not the correct mailing-list.

    I tried Xpra, which is the one I am already familiar with, but the Xpra
    client in the Linux sandbox only showed black windows, even with GDK_BACKEND=x11.

    Then before trying anything more fancy I tried just plain “ssh -Y” and
    it was plenty fluid enough, so I did not try anything fancier.

    (But that means I have to find out why Firefox is disastrously slow when
    I run it from the classrooms to my office on our gigabit network with millisecond latency.)

    Regards,

    --
    Nicolas George

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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