Librem 11 + remote desktop for elderly parents

Hardware Librem 11
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What I want:

Like many people, I have tech-illiterate parents that come to me for help with computers. I want to give them a Librem 11 fully set up, and be able to manage it remotel since I live across the country. While I live in a terminal, my parents do not, so sometimes I need to see what they see, and touch what they touch (90% of issues are them trying to navigate a web browser). Hence, I want to go one step further than “ssh access” and enable “remote desktop”.

What others have done:

Poking around on the forums, I see someone claimed wavnc should be available in Crimson [1]. Someone else seems to have gotten wayvnc working on a librem 5 without Crimson but it required some manual package management [2]. This focus on wayvnc was perplexing to me because the first line of the wayvnc README says “… GNOME … [is] not supported” [3].

What I have done

I have installed gnome-remote-desktop (comes preinstalled anyway), updated, and rebooted. However, I still don’t seem to be able to enable screen sharing from gnome-control-center>Sharing. Based on what is said at the gnome page for gnome-remote-desktop, [4], in addition to connecting via RDP (enabled via gnome-control-center>Sharing), you should also be able to connect via VNC, however, the VNC subcommand for grdctl is missing. But since the rdp subcommand of grdctl WAS there, I tried setting that up, mostly following the steps by a helpful redditor [5]. While I can ssh into the tablet just fine, I cannot same IP address to connect to the RDP server. From the remmina RDP client I get “Cannot connect to the RDP server.”

Next steps?

Has anyone gotten remote desktop working on the librem 11 (preferrably with Phosh)? Remote desktop is the only thing stopping me from completely migrating my parents away from proprietary OSes.

Sources

[1]Is it possible to use a VNC on Librem 5?
[2]Librem5 vnc remote access - #17 by ppisa
[3]GitHub - any1/wayvnc: A VNC server for wlroots based Wayland compositors
[4]Projects/Mutter/RemoteDesktop - GNOME Wiki!
[5]https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/11f5cv5/how_to_enable_ubuntu_sharing_remote_desktop_from/

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They have no problem using Gnome, and I suspect Phosh will be even easier for them. I don’t think the fact that the tablet has low battery life is really an issue at least in my case. There are really 3 main use cases:

  • playing music (i.e. via bluetooth speaker).
  • web browser (mostly login troubles here).
  • video conferencing (with me of course).

All of these should work fine on the librem 11, but all of them generally require me to move a mouse and interact with GUIs for various setup phases.

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I’m not super familiar with xwayland. I wonder if it can be used to make the main display available to a VNC server?

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