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  • Author Author: balearicdynamics
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 6731 views
  • Likes 9 likes
  • Comments 29 comments
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Pi and ssh connection without sacrificing the GUI advantages

balearicdynamics

There is something that I use almost intensively on the Linux environments and after testing this feature on Pi SSH connection I have decided to make this post. Frankly I am not sure if I have find nothing about the -Y feature mentioned around Element14 because it's so obvious to be silly or it is really a very few used feature. Apologise if it is the first case image

 

This feature has been tested with raspian wheezy on all the Raspberry PI models included the first version no more available on the market

 

Enabling the ssh protocol for remote communication with raspi-config on the Pi this affects also the linux X-Server. As the Linux GUI is a server, as a matter of fact it has the server features we can expect. So, launching the Pi remote connection from a terminal on your main computer call the command with this option:

 

$>ssh -Y pi@[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]

 

where [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] is the device network IP address. That's all!

I saw in many demo and presentations the use of the VLC application to show the Pi desktop somewhere else with the board connected in headless mode (without a directly connected monitor), mostly for screen-capture purposes. You should take in account that this is a more reliable option for at least two main reasons:

 

  1. You will use the user interface only when it is really needed.
  2. As Pi respect a laptop or PC has less resources, you use less memory and less resources in this way because only the specific process(es) you are using are consuming memory and CPU to manage the graphic interface.

 

The following image shows the MPIDE and the file-open launched from the the Pi while it is connected via ssh from a Mac desktop.

 

image

 

Another important aspect representing a great advantage respect any other method to manage the Pi GUI in this way, is that the clipboard sharing. This means that you can copy pieces of text  from the main computer and paste them to the Pi currently running application. The following image shows the sentence I have put in blue in above in this post, pasted in the leafpad Pi text-editor application. Then, the Pi applications continue working on the Pi device (storage, OS etc.). This is great when copying and pasting documents, moving images and so on.

 

image

  • Great write up Balearic Dynamics , I must have missed it. Clem alerted me to it when commenting on this post

     

    Taking Advantage of X Windows on Raspberry Pi

     

    Mike

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    Enrico Miglino wrote:

     

    What I mean was not a criticism on Windows respect Linux. Simply what I mean is that when I need to manage a certain environment, I think that the best is to find all the tools - and today most of the cases are costless - that better fit.

    Well, I'm completely unembarassed about criticizing Windows.  GNU/Linux has been my primary development platform since 2011 and I would hate to go back to Windows.  Basically, Unix was created by a couple of expert programmers to make it easier and more efficient to write programs.  Windows was thrown together as a hodge-podge to make money for Bill Gates.  They have both been extremely successful for these individual purposes.

     

    So what took me so long to switch to GNU/Linux?  Well, it wasn't because of having to learn something new.  I had first used Unix in the late 1970s, long before MS-DOS and Windows.  It was because for a long time you really had to be an expert system admin to manage a GNU/Linux system.  I want to be a user-space developer and not a system guru.  However, thanks to Ubuntu and others it's now really easy to install GNU/Linux and there's very little management a normal users needs to do.  So there's really no "ease of use" reason to avoid GNU/Linux.

     

    On the other hand, my experience with Windows is that it's really hard to keep a Windows machine going because of its vunerability to malware.  IMO if you don't have system staff that can keep your Windows machine clean, you'd better stay away from it or at least never, ever hook it up to the Internet.  Since I'm an independent consultant without system staff, I stay away from Windows whenever possible.  This is my own experience -- YMMV.

     

    For most users, there's no good reason to use Windows.  For office software Libre Office and other FLOSS software does the job quite nicely.  There is some engineering software that only runs on Windows, such as Cypress PSoC Creator.  This is unfortunate, because it means that there are nifty technologies out there like PSoC that I probably won't get a chance to try unless I get desperate enough to fire up an off-line Windows machine and install software from CD-ROM.  That's OK for me -- there's plenty of other technology available from vendors like Xilinx who realize that having GNU/Linux versions of their tools is good for business.

     

    JMO/YMMV

     

    P.S.  Thanks again for showing us "ssh -Y".  It's a really easy way to do X Windows on a remote RasPi.

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    Enrico,

         If more people were open to other ideas, there would be fewer arguments on semantics. I am glad you understand a solution is only as good as the people that can apply it.

    Clem

  • in reply to shabaz

    What I mean was not a criticism on Windows respect Linux. Simply what I mean is that when I need to manage a certain environment, I think that the best is to find all the tools - and today most of the cases are costless - that better fit. If for tenth of years I have used something, or not something else, it does not matter if today I see that this is the better solution. I see that this means to keep continuously updated and studying new things but if not so what is the sense to presume to create innovation?

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    Enrico Miglino wrote:

     

    The point is, in my personal opinion, that for some strange reason most of the engineer involved in the electronic development, especially with stuff like Arduino, Yun, Rasperry Pi and so on uses Windows as they development platform. That is unfortunately the less performant, less adapt and less reliable system just to develop open source applications based on Linux.

    ..

    Sounds strange.

     

    It's not strange at all that many engineers use Windows. It is the worlds most popular desktop OS - by a massive margin.

     

    But, I'll try not to digress into an Windows/Mac/Linux preference - because often those same engineers are equally happy to use Linux where it makes sense.I think the discussion was about X.

    It's nice to have cross-platform options for using X (e.g. for the times that X does make sense - it doesn't make sense always), and now the comments to the post do list some methods to do this for Windows users too, rather than just Mac users. And it also now lists some other options - VNC and remote desktop for example, for the times one really does need a remote view of a desktop, and some benefits/disadvantages were discussed.

     

    If X makes sense for you, for running an IDE, then this is great!