Ramin Honary: Laptop as KVM with X11 and SSH
tilde.town

Here is my latest blog post on a method of using a laptop equipped with an X11 server as a KVM or graphical dumb terminal (not to be confused with “kernel virtual machine”) to display an entire desktop environment on one of the virtual terminals of the laptop. You might be familiar with running an X11-compatible program over SSH, seeing a remote GUI app displayed on your local machine. You could also run a whole desktop environment such as “xfce4-session” over SSH and attach it to a virtual terminal (which you switch between using Ctrl-Alt-F1 through Ctrl-Alt-F7, usually, on Debian-based systems).

This is nice if you have a few always-on Raspberry Pis laying around, and you usually use SSH to remote login and control them, but you would like to have a full desktop environment, not just one app, show up on your local computer.

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
    9·
    9 months ago

    My favorite is doing this on a windows host with rootless x and having classic gnome on top of my windows desktop 😹

      • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
        41·
        9 months ago

        While I agree Wayland still immature despite decade of development, you don’t have to be a dick when voicing your opinion.

            • PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              21·
              9 months ago

              They aren’t random. They’re the wayland cult followers. People say whatever they want about a band of frothing mouthed cultists doing a downvote brigade. Go suck a toe or something, you need a binky.

              • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
                2·
                9 months ago

                Just a handful of downvotes baited you into a flamer and lashed out at any comment mentioning Wayland regardless the context. I never insult you or downvoted you even once and yet you keep dishing out vitriol. To make it worse, you even did it to a wrong person. Do my comment history looks like a Wayland fanboy to you? Seriously dude, you need to chill. Don’t let some trolls turns you into trolls yourself.

                • PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  11·
                  9 months ago

                  Hey, the vitriol for wayland and it’s followers ends when wayland ends or becomes a true full X12… or at a minimum, feature parity with X11, and doing it without other people writing hack add-ons to kluge it to work. Is it dead yet? No? Then why stop criticizing it for it being a huge distraction pulling away the real needed development effort for X?

        • PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          25·
          9 months ago

          Three things you can count on. Vegans, Wayland fanbois, and Arch users all telling us about their respective choice. That is being a dick.

  • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    9 months ago

    As a Windows sysadmin who knows embarrassingly little about Linux, how is the performance? Is it comparable to RDP or better?

    • Ramin Honary@lemmy.mlOP
      2·
      9 months ago

      I should look into it, but I don’t know whether or not X11 provides for any kind of video compression when updating regions of the screen. I only ever use this over a an 802.11g LAN so even if there is no video compression I don’t notice any lag. I haven’t tried using it over the Internet, but I am guessing it would probably be a bit slow.

    • PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      9 months ago

      The performance isn’t the best, when compared to RDP. Protocols like RDP can take shortcuts by treating it more as an image then a fully remote rendering, like image compression techniques. For tunneling an X-window over SSH, the compression option you have is with the connection, itself. Using say, ssh -CX or ssh -CY allows ssh to compress the connection for better performance, but that compression able to do lossy image compression. The killer will be latency. If it’s over a highly latent connection, like a WAN or satellite, it will be rough. But on a wired lan, or decent local wifi, it’s pretty all right.