Access to device screen remotely

Project help
1

Hi !

I’ve looked at the balena-vnc-exemple. It looks like the purpose of this repo is to run on a headless device to run remote only GUI application.

I’m looking for a way to connect to a device with a screen and see what is on the device screen (running something similar to the browser block).

Has anyone build something similar already ?

I’m running a multi service app, with thoses services:

  • ui.x11 : based on balenaplayground/balenalabs-browser but does not start the browser)
  • ui.browser : based on balenaplayground/balenalabs-browser but connect to the x11 server from the ui.x11 service (/tmp/.X11-unix & /tmp/.X11-auth are shared by volume)

It’s done like this because I also run other x11 app, so it’s safer to edit or add x11 app Dockerfile. It also allows me to update one app without restarting the whole x11 server (a user might be using the browser I don’t want to restart the browser just because another app is updated)

I tried with TeamViewer but couldn’t manage to automate the initialisation. I’m now trying to run a vncserver but I’m having issue with that as well.

I’m also open to any suggestion of other tools I could use here :slight_smile:

thank you !

1 Like
6

Hey @mathroc looks like you are building a really interesting application. We would love to help you more!

Do you have any public repo where we can check this out and see how we can help you more on specific issues?

On the other hand, since some time ago we have been thinking that VNC and x11 would be great blocks to add on balenaHub. Would you like to contribute on them?

8

Quick followup question, did you ever get this running Mathieu?

10

Hi! sorry for not replying earlier

I’m working on this project for a client as a freelancer and I didn’t have much time for this subject lately. unfortunately the repository is not open source so I can’t show you right know what it looks like, but since then I had a few ideas I want to try, I’ll post here how it goes :slight_smile:

I have not tried installing blocks from BalenaHub yet but I should look into this. I was wondering: is it possible to install multiple blocks on the same device ? And, can a custom (multi containers app) interact with blocks installed directly from BalenaHub ?

11

Hi there, you should be able to use multiple blocks on the same device :slight_smile: You should also be able to interact with blocks from custom containers too, assuming that those blocks have some sort of outgoing interface (e.g some http API etc) Let us know how it goes