Hello,
I just used “BoxBuddy” to create a container with Fedora 39 and successfully installed the MATE Desktop and KasmVNC on it. This means I can remotely access this container and work inside it via a UI!
Here is the image I created
❯ distrobox ls
ID | NAME | STATUS | IMAGE
ed8a31b510bd | f39 | Up 4 hours | quay.io/fedora/fedora:39
KasmVNC has a Fedora 39 package which I successfully installed with sudo yum install kasmvncserver_fedora_thirtynine_1.3.1_x86_64.rpm
I then added my user to the certificate group sudo usermod -a -G kasmvnc-cert $USER in order to have access to the file /etc/pki/tls/private/kasmvnc.pem. though I noticed that I had to re-run su for the container-only group membership to be picked up, like this:
📦[myuser@f39 ~]$ sha256sum /etc/pki/tls/private/kasmvnc.pem
sha256sum: /etc/pki/tls/private/kasmvnc.pem: Permission denied
📦[myuser@f39 ~]$ su - myuser
📦[myuser@f39 ~]$ sha256sum /etc/pki/tls/private/kasmvnc.pem
edf182985e46d40b18bd9f8f87b5148727a7eea9b5f23cffbe953597c159c113 /etc/pki/tls/private/kasmvnc.pem
I then installed the MATE desktop with (note that you may need to disable the disk space check):
$ grep diskspacecheck /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
diskspacecheck=False
$ sudo yum group install "MATE Desktop" --skip-broken
So at this point I created a user with vncpasswd and then ran vncserver -select-de mate as per the instructions which also included the above steps:
$ vncserver -select-de mate
Warning: f39.myhost:1 is taken because of /tmp/.X1-lock
Remove this file if there is no X server f39.myhost:1
New 'f39.myhost:2 (myhostuser)' desktop is f39.myhost:2
Users configured:
myvncuser (can use keyboard and mouse)
myhostuser (can use keyboard and mouse)
Log file is /home/myhostuser/.vnc/f39.myhost:2.log
Starting applications specified in /home/myhostuser/.vnc/xstartup
Paste this url in your browser:
https://fe80::ffcf:e465:d3cc:a2b0%wlp0s20f3:8445
https://fe80::64ba:4736:8fc0:833e%tailscale0:8445
https://192.168.9.133:8445
Well, surprisingly it worked! I am now in front of this screen, with a GUI running inside that container! I am playing a youtube video inside the container with a firefox running inside the container!
Headless remote desktop for everyone!
Of course I’ve only been using this for a minute. Remains to be seen how stable it is. Also curious to see how well it performs if I really log in remotely (this is currently a “same physical box” network connection).
Only problem so far: there is no sound on the YT video. I’ve no idea what this funny-looking guy might be talking about… 