Linux Remote Desktop in Docker (part 1)

Here are my investigations about remote technologies in Linux.
My aim - to create docker container with firefox and access it remotely over the network.
This is kind of manual testing environment.



This is all kind of future. So let's get started.

Container doesn't have monitor attached. How can we overcome this? We need a headless XWindow server.

Where are 2 alternatives here: Xvfb and XDummy.

Xvfb is an X server that can run on machines with no display hardware and no physical input devices. It emulates a dumb framebuffer using virtual memory.

XDummy is the video driver which allows you to use the X server.

What is the prefferred solution? Xvfb doesn't support XRANDR extension which allow to resize the screen on the fly, while XDummy does allow.

How can we export the X over the network?

One can use VNC servers. There are a lot of them. For example: x11vnc.
There are other solutions like x2go, xpra.

All of them are open source.

I had successfully run vnc and x2go, but I have had no success with the xpra on windows as client.

Which solutions are better? For example, x11vnc+Xdummy terminal services are a little better than x11vnc+Xvfb. X2go can be run over low band connections.

X2go has much more to offer, but I have to investigate this further.

What if you doesn't have VNC client? One can use browser! There is a VNC browser client called noVNC.

I have found out the following ready to use containers with x2go: https://github.com/chernykhalexander/DockerX2go/tree/master/centos and VNC with noVNC: https://github.com/chernykhalexander/docker-ubuntu-vnc-desktop.