[winswitch] [EXTERNAL] Re: xpra shadow works, but start-desktop just shows a black screen

[Ben Sferrazza]

On Mon, 2019-04-15 at 23:57 +0000, Ben Sferrazza via shifter-users
wrote:
> > On 12/04/2019 21:33, Ben Sferrazza via shifter-users wrote:
> > > On 12/04/2019 05:47, Ben Sferrazza via shifter-users wrote:
> > > > > I'm running Xpra 2.5 from the Xpra repo on Ubuntu 18.10. The
> > > > > client is Xpra 3.0 on Windows 10. Using 'xpra shadow' works
> > > > > well, but I can't get 'xpra start-desktop' to work. It merely
> > > > > shows a black screen.
> > > > xpra start-desktop on its own will only start an empty full-
> > > > window
> > > > session, you need to start a window manager or some other
> > > > application to
> > > > interact with, ie for testing:
> > > > xpra start-desktop --start=xterm
> > > > Then you can start a window manager or something else from the
> > > > xterm
> > > I'm sorry, I should have mentioned I used --start=gnome-session.
> > Well, there is your problem.
> > Try a different window manager, or as per above just an xterm, and
> > you
> > will find that things work just fine.
> > gnome is known to be problematic and may not work without an
> > accelerated
> > X11 server.

Using xfce4 instead of gnome seems to work well. I'm satisfied with
that as a solution. The only issue is that I'd like to run 'xpra start-
desktop' as a service so that I may be able to remotely login into that
session even if my computer were to unexpectedly restart while I'm out
of the office. It would also allow me to use the same work PC that Xpra
is run on and attach to it locally, treating that Xpra desktop as my
main session whether local or remote. I figured this might be a common
use case, but didn't find any info regarding using it as a service,
much as one would do with a headless Linux VNC setup.

I tried following much of the ArchLinux wiki, without success. This is
still being run on Ubuntu 18.10.


Here's an xpra at .service I created under /etc/systemd/system:


[Unit]
Description=Xpra Remote Desktop
After=syslog.target network.target nfs-home.mount

[Service]
Type=simple
User=%i
EnvironmentFile=/etc/conf.d/xpra
ExecStart=/usr/bin/xpra --no-daemon start-desktop --start=startxfce4
${%i}

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target


And the /etc/conf.d/xpra:


myusername=:2


I enabled the service by using 'systemctl enable 
xpra at myusername.service'

>