• [gentoo-user] x11-wm/xpra

    From White, Phil@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jul 2 14:50:01 2025
    Good Evening!

    I'm attempting to get xpra working on a headless server -- and not
    having much success. Any advice/hints would be very much welcomed.

    Background: I'm trying to provision a thin client (Raspberry Pi,
    running Raspberry Pi OS, and Wayland/labwc). My Gentoo server is
    headless. Things are complicated by the fact that I know very little
    about Wayland, and not a lot more about the intricate workings of X!
    And, at this point, I'm only *assuming* that xpra is the answer to
    what I am trying to achieve...

    What works (commands issued on the Raspberry):

    1) Test that I can do simple X forwarding...
    ssh -X 192.168.123.254 xeyes
    ssh -X 192.168.123.254 xclock
    Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion

    2) Test that the thin client is able to receive and display a
    connection on a loopback to itself
    xpra start ssh:192.168.123.70 --start-child="xclock"
    - or, performing the same task in a slightly different way: on the server:
    xpra start :100
    DISPLAY=:100 xclock &

    and on the client:
    xpra attach ssh:192.168.123.70:100

    3) Attempt to do the same thing, running application on the server. This FAILS.
    xpra start ssh:192.168.123.254 --start-child="xarclock"

    My general approach is to keep things minimal, so the USE flags I
    attempted to install xpra with were:
    USE = "minimal server". This wouldn't work at all, so I'm currently
    using USE="server client X gtk3".

    Now I'm hitting the following error message within the client:
    "disconnect invalid packet encoding: 'rencode' decoder is not available"

    I have the package dev-python/rencode installed, but this doesn't
    help. I'm assuming that this is a server problem? I had to manually
    install paramiko, since this wasn't pulled in by dependencies -- could
    this be a similar issue? Or is it somply a configuration issue?

    I'm now getting frustrated, not quite knowing what the problem is. An
    added complexity is that xpra is now on v6.3.1 upstream, but only
    v6.2.5-r1 in portage. Would I be better simply compiling by hand from
    the upstream sources?

    Does anyone here use xpra, and can give pointers on how to get this
    working please?


    With thanks,
    Phil

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