Librem 5 and VNC

Hardware Librem 5
1

I have mentioned in one of my other post I want to use Librem 5 in headless mode while it is getting charged towards end of day when at home. This would be a similar setup as the Raspberry Pi.

While I am waiting for my Librem 5 delivery, I tried to make the VNC work on the VirtualBox with latest Librem 5 (of course x86_64) image.
Here is what I got so far;

  1. I installed LXDE on Librem 5 as I could not get GNOME work with VNC. With GNOME, I get a black screen no actual desktop. With lxde, exec startlxde in the xstartup script the LXDE desktop shows up
  2. RealVNC does not work out-of-box as it works with Raspberry Pi. Not sure on changes to be made.
  3. TigerVNC and TightVNC work well after tweaking the xstartup script to use LXDE.

Issue
The remote desktop that comes up in tigervncviewer (both for tigervnc and tightvnc) the LXDE desktop shows up fine. But when I launch any application it opens it in the original virtualbox window rather than on the VNCViewer window.

Using x0vncserver (from tigerVNC) does show up the Librem 5 desktop but it is not the full-screen desktop mode. It is the Librem 5 screen with Librem 5 resolution.

@dos, can you provide suggestions on setting changes on Librem 5 so the desktop opened in the VNCViewer is full-blown desktop and application open in it?

2

If you are already using LXDE that means that you are using Xorg. At that point you could use xrandr to create a virtual screen at you desired size and use that for your VNC server instead.

Whether that will actually work on the Librem 5 though I’m not sure. Firstly because I’m not sure how well it supports Xorg and secondly because I’m not sure how many screens it supports. Another option would be to “force” the USB-C output to be enabled even if there’s no monitor there and use that instead of the virtual screen i said before.

3

tigervncserver allows any geometry, e.g.
tigervncserver -geometry 1920x1080 :1