Remote desktop all users

[dougy]

Hi, I'm a recent Mac convert and with the help of this forum and the Internet, I've gotten remote desktop sharing working on my Mint 19 installation. But it's not working the way I would like, ie. the way it did on the Mac.

Let me describe the behaviour I'm trying to achieve. On our Mac, remote desktop is enabled on a system wide basis with a single password. With RealVNC client on my iPad I could connect to our Mac and land on the desktop of whoever was logged in at the time, or at the login screen if that was its current state. I could logout if it wasn't my account, the session would terminate, and I would re-connect and then login to my account. The session terminates again, and I re-connect again and finally I'm at my desktop.

In Mint, desktop sharing is enabled on a per user basis. So the only way I could do something similar is to enable desktop sharing with an alternative port number for each user. But the problem with this setup is that if the remote computer is at the login screen, either when I connect initially or if I log out from someone's desktop, then I cannot connect and login as I could on the Mac since there is no listening process for this situation.

I'm currently using Vino from 18.3 to have the Desktop Sharing gui, but I've since discovered that I can change settings using Dconf Editor. And that's how I turned off encryption and change the port number for each user to make this work at all.

So is it possible to configure remote desktop sharing to have the same behaviour as on the Mac?

[smurphos]

I've not tried this but the approach I would take to this problem is setting up SSH access on the remote and the remote user accessing via SSH, logging in and starting vino. This could all be handled by a script..

There might be easier ways but not with vino has the server....

See https://askubuntu.com/questions/304017/ ... hrough-ssh

[dougy]

I found my answer here viewtopic.php?t=192846. Hopefully it will work for LM19.

[smurphos]

I found my answer here viewtopic.php?t=192846. Hopefully it will work for LM19.

x11vnc is my server of choice, but be aware that the version in the Mint 19 repos is reported as buggy and prone to crashing. There are workarounds towards the tail end of this bugreport - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1686084

I don't think the method outlined in that thread will work well as it's pre - systemd.

Take a look at http://www.lueckdatasystems.com/Success ... nial-Xerus & http://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=10426

[dougy]

I found my answer here viewtopic.php?t=192846. Hopefully it will work for LM19.

x11vnc is my server of choice, but be aware that the version in the Mint 19 repos is reported as buggy and prone to crashing. There are workarounds towards the tail end of this bugreport - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... ug/1686084

I don't think the method outlined in that thread will work well as it's pre - systemd.

Take a look at http://www.lueckdatasystems.com/Success ... nial-Xerus & http://c-nergy.be/blog/?p=10426

Yeah it didn't work. But I did come across this https://unlockforus.com/remotely-contro ... vnc-setup/ which is essentially the same method as what you suggested. It's working as I wanted.

[wayland]

I used these instructions and it was fairly simple to get going;
https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2334

However x11vnc will crash out if you try ssl, gotta be no encryption.

You can see if port 5900 is open using;

sudo lsof -i

You can restart the crashed service using;

sudo systemctl restart x11vnc.service

The service starts when the computer starts and you get your desktop login screen. It does not log out when you disconnect which could be a problem. It's a mirror of your desktop, same as what is on the physical monitor.