Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I have a lot of progress to report on remote accessing my computers from each other. Let’s get started!
I spent most of my time for the blog this week in that workshop I joined a few months ago. A lot happened, but I am not the main mind who put everything together, and I don’t fully understand everything that’s going on.
This week, I gained the ability to log into Derpy, my secondary Minecraft server/Linux testing platform, from another computer using TightVNC (Virtual Network Computer). TightVNC is one of many desktop viewing applications; most others cost while I’m working with a free version.
The first step was to set up a server on Derpy and get another computer to try and connect. We eventually ended up with a “gray” error screen with a black x pointer if we had everything working as best as was possible (it was actually a complex pattern of black and white pixels).
Part of the wonkeyness of remoting in involves screen parameters, like size and this one I know nothing much about called color depth. Something along the way likes a color depth of 24.
While we tried a few possible fixes, multiple places said to put GNOME on for the graphical interface. While I find the Cinnamon nice and convenient, I am more than willing to explore something new to find something that works… GNOME surprised me with that pesky zoom in thing I abandon Unity over.
I did a bit of research, and the popular Unity environment is built on GNOME. I hypothesized that Unity had changed something Cinnamon couldn’t care less about. None of the normal zoom in fixes worked, and the text had their smooth, vector based look, even though they were huge, so we knew the picture was at the correct resolution.
Over an hour of pointless guesswork later, I had outsourced the problem to a Linux support Discord server. After no response and someone else’s problem getting solved, I reuploaded along with a photo of the screen this time. Over the next three minutes or so, a couple users by the names of MotherM and ~> yay -s Superuser went back and forth trying to figure it out until a user by the name of PlasmaPower offered a command to restore the correct interface scale factor to 1 where Superuser had identified it as at a factor of 2.
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 1
With GNOME functioning properly, I was able to make a connection and even managed to open the Minecraft server remotely. However, any new graphical programs, including terminals, opened up in the host machine. It turns out, using TightVNC server hosts an extra login session, at least the way it was set up. Before I left the workshop, we got a script set up to automatically start the VNC server whenever the computer restarts.
Later, I figured out that if I logged out from the host machine, newly opened programs work as expected. I also eliminated one of my dual hypotheses. New programs prefer to open locally before yielding to remote sessions when dealing with multiple logins from the same username, not the first session started.
As it stands, the connection is stable. Future improvements may include sizing the resolution to fit my secondary monitor and getting a version of GNOME installed I can relate to a little better. I should also be able to set it up for CLI mode only for the host terminal.
Final Question: Linux is apparently the hardest OS to get set up for remoting into. When was the last time you reached the finish line, only to find out you were doing it the hard way, even if the easy way wouldn’t have worked for you anyway?