LXDE Desktop Environment

[esawtooth]

Okay, this might certainly be a bit out there, and a bit of an anti-pattern to what Cloudron apps seem to be about, but I was recently experimenting with bringing up an LXDE desktop environment on a cloudron container with tightvncserver installed and running. I could bring an app up for this, without the user having sudo access of course, and being limited at container creation time in the programs they can install and run on it. LXDE seems to work well even with a default container ram limit of 256 MB. The desktop can be made accessible on a VNC port.

In terms of use case, there might be some value for folks who want to setup a persistent, regularly backed-up remote development environment with emacs or eclipse, or say, for folks who are into photography and need a place to run RawTherapee or darktable.

[robi]

@esawtooth This is already in the works via the Sysbox work we've been doing to be able to run full system containers.

It would be great to get some help moving that forward and make your use case a reality.

[murgero]

@robi Sysbox + Guacamole = decently feature-rich VDI env.

[robi]

@murgero did you create this already?

[esawtooth]

@robi @murgero This is a rather interesting approach with all sorts of interesting possibilities. I haven't tried sysbox yet, though I'd be happy to help in any way I can!

[murgero]

@robi I wish. I would love to be able to have a virtual desktop on my cloud server I could remote into in the event I needed a quick, secure desktop.

[robi]

I just got word from the Sysbox guys that once their new release is done, they will be interested in getting this going.

Exciting times!

[atridad]

@robi H Y P E

[robi]

@atrilahiji I will call it synchronicity and timing.

[Rodny Molina]

@esawtooth, @murgero, @atrilahiji ...

As @robi mentioned, this is one of the features at the top of our to-do-list, so please stay tuned.

Now, most of the functionality required to make this setup work should be already there. Actually, i did a prototype of this a few months ago and don't remember seeing any blockers. I installed Guacamole on the host (through their containerized approach), and then installed xfce4 and tightvncserver within a sysbox container. That's pretty much it. Users would then interact with the Guacamole server (web-based), and reach their sysbox-based environments through the Guacamole interface.

The work that is pending is mainly on the hw-acceleration area, so that we allow GUI apps seating in nested containers (levels > 1), to talk to the hosts' GPUs; apps running at the sysbox container level (level == 1) should be already able to talk to the GPUs.

Please ping me if any of you is interested in trying / documenting this setup, i'd be happy to help.