Remote Desktop Applications

Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 15 min

Questions

• What are some programs we can run on our remote desktop?

Objectives

• We’ll run some programs on our remote desktop

First, a disclaimer: IceWM is a bare bones window manager. The functionality is very basic. If you want something that is a bit more modern, perhaps check out ubuntu-mate-desktop, or some of the other choices in the Remote Desktop Foundation section.

Terminal

The first thing we can do with our remote desktop is open up a terminal – or many terminals.

In IceWM:

• Right click the desktop and select ‘Terminal’

or

• Click on the IceWM menu bar and select Terminal

The default terminal that is launched is xterm. It is fairly low on features, but will do the trick. (An example of a terminal with a more full feature set is gnome-terminal. It depends on a lot of packages though, since it is part of the Gnome desktop environment).

Try right-clicking on a terminal window to get a window to increase the size of the font.

You can use a terminal to start another terminal with a very specific font:

xterm -fa 'Monospace' -fs 14 &

Note that the & at the end of that line says “put the program in the background” – it allows our original terminal to still accept commands. A lot of programs can be started from the terminal this way. It’s okay to start a graphical program without the &, you just won’t have access to the terminal you started it with (you use Ctrl-Z and bg in the terminal to get your command prompt back, if you need it).

Editor

There are many choices for editors for Linux systems. Many popular ones don’t require desktops (e.g. vim, nano, and emacs). Others are suitable for use in a desktop environment.

Many such editors depend on having an entire desktop editor installed (for example gedit which comes with Gnome). One that has a very small list of dependencies is nedit:

sudo apt install nedit

When installed, we can start nedit from a terminal with:

nedit &

Or if we have a specific file that we want to edit or create, open it with:

nedit my_file.txt &

Browser

We’ll install the firefox browser. You could also install the Google Chrome browser by going to the Chrome website and downloading the Debian/Ubuntu package for it.

sudo apt install firefox

Again at the terminal:

firefox &

R Studio

R is a programming language for doing data science/statistics.

We can install the R language with:

sudo apt install r-base

The R language does not rely on having a desktop environment and runs in a terminal, simply by typing:

R

We can assign a variable x the numbers from 1 through 5 and compute the mean:

x <- 1:5
mean(x)

(Ctrl-D to quit, don’t save the workspace image.)

Many R programmers prefer to work with RStudio, an integrated graphical program for programming, inspecting and visualizing data.

This program isn’t in the main Ubuntu repositories, so we need to download it directly:

wget https://download1.rstudio.org/desktop/bionic/amd64/rstudio-1.4.1717-amd64.deb

Now that we have the package, we can install it (and it’s dependencies) with:

sudo apt install ./rstudio-1.4.1717-amd64.deb

Now at the terminal, start it up:

rstudio &

Try the same short program above in RStudio…

(Note that RStudio appears to work with TigerVNC, but not with some of the other VNC providers.)

Ummm, Blender?

Some 3D graphics programs using OpenGL will work through VNC (although this isn’t an ideal way to run them; they work best with specialized graphics cards on non-virtual desktops).

The follow appears to work with TigerVNC, but not with some of the other VNC providers.

sudo apt install blender

Start it with:

blender &

Key Points

• There are many programs we can run on our remote desktop