Remote desktop Debian -> ChromeBook

[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.

Thanks in advance.

[Xiyue Deng]

Post by 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.
Thanks in advance.

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.

[1] https://remotedesktop.google.com/

[Nicolas George]

Post by Xiyue Deng
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,

[Paul van der Vlis]

Post by 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

[Anssi Saari]

Post by Nicolas George
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.

[Greg Wooledge]

Post by Anssi Saari
I've mostly used VNC and x2go for Windows-to-Linux and Linux-to-Linux.
- 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.

[Nicolas George]

Post by Nicolas George
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,