[gentoo-user] Re: How to run X11 apps remotely?
On 2022-03-22, Grant Taylor wrote: > On 3/22/22 10:41 AM, Grant Edwards wrote: >> How does one run "modern" X11 apps remotely? > > Xvnc > > As in run an Xvnc server as an X11 server / display. Point your > programs at that display / server. Then have a VNC client connect to > said VNC server. I've used VNC in the past, and always ended up with a virtual desktop/screen rather than having a remote application show up in a window. >> I do not want a "remote desktop". I just want to run a single >> application on a remote machine and have its window show up locally. > > You can adjust the size of the Xvnc's display so that it's the size of > just the application in question. You also don't need the full desktop > to display on that screen. OK, I've done that, but it's a little awkward to have to constantly adjust the Xvnc display to match the application window size. It appears that Xpra can handle that automatically. >> X11 transparent network support was its killer feature, > I completely agree. Especially when you start running different > programs on different systems / users / contexts. > >> but for all practical purpopses, that feature seems to have been >> killed. > > I don't think that's true. Of course it depends on which X11 apps you need to run remotely. For everything I've needed to run remotely in the past decade or so, it was unusable. The path to my remote host is also rather ugly. It jumps most of the way across the county and back through at least two NAT firewalls. Though the ping time is actually pretty decent (15-20ms) for the path it has to take. -- Grant
[gentoo-user] Re: How to run X11 apps remotely?
ah, yes. i completely forgot about xpra. probabably a better solution than spice. -JimC -- James Cloos OpenPGP: 0x997A9F17ED7DAEA6
[gentoo-user] Re: How to run X11 apps remotely?
On 2022-03-22, Grant Edwards wrote: > How does one run "modern" X11 apps remotely? > [...] > I do not want a "remote desktop". I just want to run a single > application on a remote machine and have its window show up locally. It looks like xpra will do what I want: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/x11-wm/xpra It's interesting that it's classified as a window manager. >From https://xpra.org/: It gives you remote access to individual applications or full desktops. Xpra is usable over reasonably slow links and does its best to adapt to changing network bandwidth constraints. haven't tried it yet...
[gentoo-user] Re: How to run X11 apps remotely?
On 2022-03-22, Laurence Perkins wrote: >>Even something "lightweight" like atril is so slow it's barely usable. >> >>I do not want a "remote desktop". I just want to run a single >>application on a remote machine and have its window show up locally. >> >>Back in the day, I used to run X11 apps remotely through dial-up >>connections, and most of them were a little sluggish but still >>actually usable... >> >>X11 transparent network support was its killer feature, but for all >>practical purpopses, that feature seems to have been killed. > As you mentioned, it's a lot of extra round-trips. Which means that > it's not primarily your bandwidth that's the limiting factor, it's > the latency. > > Unfortunately, the speed of light being what it is, there are > practical limits to what you can do about latency depending on how > far apart the systems in question are. Where "far" is measured more in in hops than miles. :) Even with cut-through routing, each hop can be expensive. Add a couple firewalls with stateful packet inpsection, and latency from my house to the house next door isn't great. > But, check for and mitigate any bufferbloat issues you may have, > that will spike your latency quite a bit. > > The key back in the day was that people used X11 primitives > directly. But the X11 primitives are ugly, and there weren't any > tools for making them pretty. Yea, I remember. I wrote a couple xlib apps way back back when and it was painful. Even the old Xt toolkit wasn't fun. I do appreciate how easy it is to slap together something in Python and Gtk, I just wish it worked remotely after it was done. :) > So rather than add those mechanisms all the toolkit authors just did > their own thing and now everything is just bitmaps and practically > no processing can be done locally. > > Some programs like gVim will detect that they're running over SSH > and fall back to basic X11 for the speed factor. Not sure what > browsers might do that. Things like Xemacs are still usable, but if I'm doing emacs, I usually just run it directly in an ssh "terminal".
