For some time I’ve been wanting to run ubuntu-desktop and others, remotely, in containers, using spice. Historically vnc has been the best way to do remote desktops, but spice should provide a far better experience. Unfortunately, Xspice has always failed for me, most recently segfaulting on startup. But fortunately, this is fixed in git, and I’m told a new release may be coming soon. While waiting for the new release (0.12.7?), I pushed a package based on git HEAD to ppa:serge-hallyn/virt.

You can create a container to test this with as follows:

lxc-create -t download -n desk1 -- -d ubuntu -r trusty -a amd64 lxc-start -n desk1 -d lxc-attach -n desk1

Then inside that container shell,

add-apt-repository ppa:serge-hallyn/virt apt-get update apt-get install xserver-xspice ubuntu-desktop

ubuntu-desktop can take awhile to install. You can simply install fvwm and xterm if you want a quicker test. Once that’s all one, copy the xspice configuration file into your home directory, uncompress it, set the SpiceDisableTicketing option (or configure a password), and use the config file to configure an Xorg session:

cp /usr/share/doc/xserver-xspice/spiceqxl.xorg.conf.example.gz /root cd /root gunzip spiceqxl.xorg.conf.example.gz cat >> spiceqxl.xorg.conf.example.gz << EOF Option "SpiceDisableTicketing" "1" EOF /usr/bin/Xorg -config /root/spiceqxl.xorg.conf.example :2 &

Now fire up unity, xterm, or fvwm:

DISPLAY=:2 unity

Now connect using either spicy or spicec,

spicec -h -p 5900

Of course if the container is on a remote host, you’ll want to set up some ssh port forwards to enable that, but if needed then that’s a subject for another post.