Is sys-gui-vnc working at all?

User Support General
1

Hi,

I wonder if anyone has sys-gui-vnc working on Qubes OS 4.2.1?

I opened a github issue about it as it seems completely broken, but I was curious to know if it worked for someone. (or if it worked in the past at least?)

2

I’m also curious about the actual compatibility in comparison to the compromise solution (sys-gui). As far as I know it is supposed to pass the gpu through to the graphics vm but doesn’t work with most cards/setups. I think I saw in some of the documentation that it was meant to work with intel out of the box, has anyone had any success with the starlabs starbook and this?

3

After applying the fixes (not available through updates yet), sys-gui-vnc works :+1:

I have a qube with a vpn-server serving as an entrypoint to the VNC server. If I can connect to the VPN from a computer, I have access my Qubes OS over VNC.

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4

Saw Mareks reply on Github. So the SELinux was the main culprit?

5

No, there was multiple issues at the same time:

  • the service name was wrong
  • a piece of xorg.conf was missing
  • selinux prevented the service to work

now, it almost works but I can’t type accented / special characters in qubes although it works in sys-gui-vnc …

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6

I will read the conversation and try it. I have not enabled a sys-gui so far and it will be a nice experiment.

7

I would be happy to have it working, I constantly switch between different computers in a day and having my qube os available remotely is practical

let me know if you have questions about the setup

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8

Using setxkbmap to configure the layout in sys-gui-vnc fixed my layout issue.

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9

Some feedback after a work week using this setup.

It’s practical for me as I can’t stand Qubes OS lack of performance and graphical acceleration on a daily basis, I can just keep my Qubes OS laptop somewhere and use VNC over a VPN (local network but it’s not drawing my bandwidth) when I need to work and use my other laptop system (where the VNC client is running) to do anything else.

“It works for me” doesn’t imply it’s suitable for everyone.

That setup is interesting as from dom0 I can configure which qube is available over VNC or dom0. I could only expose a couple of them over VNC and using the rest in dom0 (I do not have that use case, but it could be useful to someone).

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