Re: gnome-remote-desktop on bookworm

[Mark Fletcher]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 at 15:41, Mark Fletcher  wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> Does anyone know what state gnome-remote-desktop is in on bookworm? I can't 
> get it to work. I have a system recently upgraded to bookworm, running Gnome 
> if that wasn't obvious.
>

This turned out to be caused by port number confusion. Some of the
summary info about gnome-remote-desktop suggests it offers both VNC
and RDP protocols. Digging deeper into the docs it turns out that RDP
is offered by default and you have to dig deeper to turn on VNC. Port
5900 is the VNC port, the RDP port being 3389. gnome-remote-desktop
was listening on 3389, and when I downloaded an RDP as opposed to VNC
client on the client side and tried that, it worked.

Incidentally the gnome-remote-desktop docs say you have to use a
command line tool to turn on VNC support, but when you invoke said
tool, its help only offers any info about RDP options.. Still haven't
figured out how to turn on VNC support -- but that's OK because I have
RDP working now.

The other thing I have learned through this experience is that there
are a large number of extremely crap RDP client apps available for the
iPad -- I had to kiss a fair number of frogs before I found a decent
one. One of the frogs included a tool that claimed to be _made by
Microsoft_ but didn't map the screen properly, so where you were
clicking wasn't where you thought you were clicking. Never mind, I
found a decent one in the end.

Mark

gnome-remote-desktop on bookworm

[Mark Fletcher]

Hi

Does anyone know what state gnome-remote-desktop is in on bookworm? I can't
get it to work. I have a system recently upgraded to bookworm, running
Gnome if that wasn't obvious.

In Gnome settings, under Sharing I have turned on Remote Desktop and Remote
Control, but other clients on my network can't connect, saying the port
can't be contacted. Those machines can connect to the machine in question
in other ways, eg ssh.

I googled for this and found a discussion in an Ubuntu forum where they
used lsof to show that nothing was listening on the RDP port, 5900. The
cause on that occasion was held to be that Ubuntu was using a different
major version of gnome-control-center (41) to that of gnome-remote-desktop
(42). I've checked and in bookworm right now the major version of both is
43.

# lsof -i TCP:5900

returns nothing. Same for all port numbers between 5900 and 5909 (I checked
in case it was using a different virtual desktop number). That suggests to
me the remote desktop server is not listening, although the settings would
have me believe it is. I also tried a reboot although I realise this isn't
Windows but just in case... no dice.

Is anyone using this (relatively new, I gather) feature of Gnome? Did you
have to do anything else to get it to work?

Thanks all

Mark