[TriLUG] attaching to remote X session (_not_ VNC)

[Aaron Joyner]

I had some discussion around the dinner table with friends about the
mechanics of why this isn't really practical with out a middle-man
server... the full scope of why is a longer post for another night.

In the mean time I'll tack on the practical advice that people use NX or
VNC over WAN links, instead of the raw X11 protocol, for a host of really
good reasons.  It basically boils down to the fact that X11 (like NFS, and
many other ~ancient unix protocols) really assumes that you have a very low
latency, relatively high bandwidth, link between the client and server
(like a unix domain socket :) ), and it's not trying to minimize it's use
of that resource.  In fact, X11 is in my mind the pathological poster child
of that problem... it's shoveling around bitmap rendering, after all.

So while I applaud your academic curiosity and desire to understand the
mechanics and what is and isn't possible... I'd be remiss if I didn't point
out that you'll be a lot better off using something like NX.  The wikipedia
page gives a lot of insight into why:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_technology

Happy graphical computing!
Aaron S. Joyner


On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 11:29 PM, Kevin Hunter Kesling
<hunteke at earlham.edu>wrote:

> At 6:59pm -0500 Mon, 02 Dec 2013, Aaron Joyner wrote:
>
>> Awesome question!  Check out xpra, a modern successor to xmove, as
>> described here:
>> http://askubuntu.com/questions/27843/redirect-
>> existing-windows-via-ssh-and-x11-forwarding
>>
>> I found it by searching for "X11 tee redirect" (because "X11 tee"
>> was all about shirts, and I couldn't remember the correct name of
>> xmove).
>>
>
> /Thank you/ for the thought process of the search terms you used.  I
> appreciate seeing how else I might have solved the problem rather than
> "just the answer".
>
>
>  http://xpra.org
>> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xpra
>>
>> I realize this violates the spirit of one of your constraints, that you
>> have to think of it in advance, but hopefully like screen (or tmux), if
>> it's useful enough to you it's just a permanent workflow change rather
>> than
>> something you wished you'd setup occasionally.
>>
>
> Excellent!  Sometimes beggars cannot be choosers.  It's not ideal to what
> I thought I was looking for (and would still be very useful, methinks), but
> this certainly looks like something around which I could wrap my head.  I'm
> diving in now ...
>
> Thanks for the pointer!
>
>
> Kevin
> --
> This message was sent to: Aaron S. Joyner <aaron at joyner.ws>
> To unsubscribe, send a blank message to trilug-leave at trilug.org from that
> address.
> TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug
> Unsubscribe or edit options on the web  : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/
> options/trilug/aaron%40joyner.ws
> Welcome to TriLUG: http://trilug.org/welcome
>