VNC / RDesktop questions

Levi Pearson levipearson at
Mon Apr 22 09:02:33 MDT 2013

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 1:28 AM, Dan Egli <ddavidegli at> wrote:

> *That's cool. I like that. I'm not really a gnome fan (I've always
> perferred KDE, although Gnome has it's uses), but I'll use it if that's the
> easiest way to get this going.*

I would not be surprised if KDE has similar functionality built-in,
but I haven't used KDE enough recently to say whether it does or not.

> *Basically what I am trying to accomplish is this: I'll have a small home
> server that will be running all but headless (probably have a basic mouse
> hooked up so X will load properly, but no keyboard or monitor) in the back
> somewhere. However, I do need to be able to access the X session that will
> be running on it (and please, don't lecture me about X on an internet
> connected server. I'm going to have the router configured so the only
> inbound connections from the net allowed to that machine are SSH
> connections. All else gets blocked on the internet side. This really is the
> only way to accomplish what I need).

There are some command line options to the X server that could help
with this. There's -allowMouseOpenFail, which will let the X session
start without a mouse, and there's -nolisten tcp that will prevent the
X server from listening for TCP connections.

> I don't really care that much if it's
> a xDM login manager or something else that is giving me the Rdesktop
> support, as long as it's there. It's all going to be on the LAN side so
> latency isn't going to be much of an issue. However, I do want to be able
> to HEAR as well as see what's going on. Will the desktop sharing option
> allow audio translation too? Or will xrdp? Although I don't expect to be
> doing a ton of work this way, I do wish to make sure that anything that
> does happen on the server itself that causes signals to go to the sound
> card (or sound chip on the motherboard) would be copied/redirected to the
> sound system on the local workstation. And it needs to be able to do that
> when the workstation is (unfortunately) Windows as well as when it's Linux.
> I know Windows has RDP support built in, so that much is easy. But I'm
> trying to ensure that whatever I do while remotely connected isn't
> mute/video only. *

Generally, X is not associated with sound at all, but there are sound
abstraction layers similar to X in most Linux distributions these
days.  Most common right now is PulseAudio, which despite its rocky
past is now a pretty worthy successor to sound servers like ESD.  It
integrates with your desktop's DBUS session bus, which is generally
associted with the Xorg server, and can be configured to transport
audio over pretty much any tunnel you care to provide for it.  So,
it's just a matter of whether your distribution has provided the
plumbing to hook PulseAudio into its RDP desktop sharing support.
Even if it's not, you could figure out how to do it manually and write
a little script to forward the audio separately from the video.

Because of the great variety of desktop environment stuff in Linux,
there's no single answer to what you want to do, but I don't see any
big missing piece that would prevent doing what you want to do.  The
only question is how much of it is preconfigured for you in the
environment you're interested in using, and I can't answer that one
for you!


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