Best fullscreen solution for vnc on linux

Question

For development, I primarily depend on Eclipse and a GNU Screen session in a terminal. At work, I have dual monitors, and have them usually maximized on each of the screens. When I work from home, I just work on my laptop screen. For optimal solution, I login via SSH and grab the screen session on to it, but for graphical programs such as Eclipse I have tried the following:

• Enable remote desktop and connect to the console via a VNC viewer. This gives me a one large contiguous screen from both monitors, which makes it slow and scrolling is a pain. Besides, I really only need one side of the screen, as the other side (running GNU Screen) is already taken care of via ssh.
• As a workaround I tried running graphical programs (such as eclipse) in a separate vncserver instance. This would allow me to connect to this alternative VNC session from home. However, this requires me to also do the same when at work. However, I would like to make this as seamless as possible, so tried vncviewer -fullscreen option, but the screen ended up spanning both monitors, with the actual screen centered (covering only half of each monitor, with the other two halves remained black).
• There is probably a 3rd solution that I didn't try, which would involve configuring both monitors as two different displays and connecting only to one of the monitors when at home. This might work fine, but I loose some flexibility to rearrange windows when at office.

I prefer the 2nd solution and wonder if there is a good VNC viewer that would allow me to run it in fullscreen, but span only one of the monitors. If there are other better options that I am not aware of, I would like to hear them too.

I almost forgot, I also tried a 4th approach using a program called WindowSwitch. This would allow you to move windows from one session to another, which is a very clever and useful extension of vncserver at individual application level. But in reality it was very flaky and buggy, so only had a partial success.

Solution 1

Try using xrdp to run your VNC session. You can specify the screen size when you open the session. When I first tried it, I found it wasn't stable, but recent releases seem very stable. See my experiences with Remote Desktops with VNC and RDP for some ideas.

Solution 2

Try specifying specific vncserver geometry for your needs:

$ vncserver -geometry <WIDTH>x<HEIGHT>

Comments

[haridsv]

Xrdp solution sounds interesting, I will try that out and see if that will be more acceptable. Your article is very useful and has solutions for a couple of issues I wanted to solve before (like having the login screen on the right screen).

[haridsv]

When I start a secondary session using vncserver, I do specify a geometry, but when connecting to the console session, you just get whatever is the total dimension that is already there.

[haridsv]

I have only had a limited chance to use xrdp so far, but it seems to work well. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting and it worked as expected. Currently IT is reinstalling the OS, so I am going to try full scale testing in a couple of days.

[haridsv]

BTW, this is where I got the xrdp 0.5: packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/amd64/xrdp/download