Hello;

I have a couple projects where I am going to need to remotely connect to a linode and access a desktop environment with a functional web browser (need to play some movies for a live webinar / classroom style presentation). Due to limitations in the speed of the presenters home connection, the movies will need to reside on and be played from the Linode.

Ubuntu would be my OS of choice for this project due to packages being available for much of the presentation software.

I had a Ubuntu server up and running. I loaded a KDE package and xtightvnc. I was able to establish a connection over VNC, but was not able to get it to render a desktop image, I don't think the desk environment was starting. (VNC connected, but the screen was always blank) I tried 3 different tutorials for setting up VNC and had the same issue with all of them. I must just be missing something, because I have done this on a linode in the past.

I can just start fresh; Can you suggest a package / packages to install that will work with the current Ubuntu 32bit OS, for a functional color desktop environment and VNC support?

Thank You,

Jamie

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Paw Dogs

NX is a decent remote access solution for linux.
I have used it for remote access of home computers for a while. works well even with not so good public wifi connections and it is sent over SSH so its more secure than VNC.

http://www.nomachine.com/download.php

Best of luck.
~Brandon

First off, you need to understand that you won't be able to play videos remotely over VNC or NX through a web browser. It's just not going to work well. Even a gigabit LAN isn't going to work for that without multimedia remoting, and multimedia remoting isn't going to work with web video anyhow. Nor would any type of video remoting solution save bandwidth, it'd always be more efficient to use the browser locally rather than remotely.

That said, here's my instructions on how I set up VNC:

I like using IceWM. It's very lightweight, and provides the basic window widgets you'd expect from a window manager. I wouldn't use it on my desktop, but for running some apps and providing a user-friendly UI for some windows, it works. It's described as "Win95-like", which is sufficient for me to run the odd remote app over VNC. You don't need a whole big desktop environment like KDE just to run some apps like a browser remotely.

If memory serves, to set this all up, I:

1) Installed the "vnc4server" package
2) Installed the "icewm" package
3) As a regular user, run "vncpasswd" to set a password (you may also want to firewall off VNC to only allow access via SSH tunneling)
4) Edit the ~/vnc/xstartup file (maybe create it if it doesn't exist? It should be executable) to run icewm instead of twm. Here's my modified file:

#!/bin/sh                                                                                           
                                                                                                    
# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop:                                             
# unset SESSION_MANAGER                                                                             
# exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc                                                                       
                                                                                                    
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup                                                  
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources                                                  
xsetroot -solid grey                                                                                
vncconfig -iconic &                                                                                 
# xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &                                    
# twm &                                                                                             
icewm

5) Start up a VNC server on display 1 with the command "vncserver :1".

6) If you want to shut it down, run "vncserver --kill :1"

If you want to run multiple simultaneous sessions, you can start up vncserver multiple times on different displays.

From there, just install whatever web browser you want.

Why can't you use YOUTUBE for your streaming content?

First off, Thank You for your responses. I apologize for the delayed response. The last 2 days here have been a bit nuts, we had a sizable storm come though Sunday evening. Personally we were spared any damage or extended power outages, though others near by were without power for a day. My DSL has been flaky since, but seems to be about back to normal today.

Let me try to clarify what we are trying to achieve, and why we are not just using YouTube, perhaps there is a better approach. I'm working with an animal trainer who has given live presentations all over the world. She wants to setup a "Virtual" classroom environment to reach more people. (currently we have done some sessions with Skype, but there have been quality issues with the audio and there are no tools for video or presentation sharing.) Being able to show parts of a video, and pause at specific moments to point things out / explain them is very important. With a large group of people, you can imagine how difficult it would be to say, "Okay, pause the video and make sure your looking at 3:13".

My solution was to run a server with Big Blue Button http://www.bigbluebutton.org/, which allows presentation / desktop sharing. Then I or the presenter would login via VNC to the server and play the movies locally from the server at the appropriate times, feeding them into the Big Blue Button RTMP setup for live streaming. I believe we would be basically using Big Blue Button as it is intended, with the exception that we would be uploading the videos in advance and then using the VNC connection to the linode to play those videos on a high speed station.

From what I have read, and please correct me if I am wrong; a setup like this using RTMP can scale quite well assuming it has the ram / power available. The biggest problem I am seeing at the moment with this setup is that Big Blue Button is sending their voip over TCP instead of UDP, which is causing very poor voice quality.

We thought of running Skype for the audio separately, though we have been really unimpressed with the conference quality of Skype even with 6 to 8 people present. My understanding is that Skype is very much dependent on the "host" computer (that of the person who starts the call) to mux the audio together for all the callers. If that is indeed correct, then we are not going to be able to get much past that 6 to 8 person limit and maintain a quality level that people can hear at.

I believe what I need is something that is fully server side to manage / mux the conference call so that it can scale; in addition to the RTMP server setup for the live video.

Are there solutions I am over looking that would be easier? I did look at the Webex type of companies, but their support for streaming video was very limited, one company said that did have a enterprise level solution for a live streaming video conference, but I got the impression the price tag was pretty high.

This doesn't have to be strictly free software either. The project can't support a $10K software purchase at this point, but I'd be willing to look at commercial software if there is something that might help get this working.

Thanks very much for your time and help.

Regards

Jamie

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Paw Dogs

This will not work. VNC is specifically made to minimize the amount of data sent over the wire in various ways and as such, will look like crap when doing video playback.

Yeah, just try VNC on your local LAN between 2 PCs and even at 100Mbps it's got crappy playback Plus no audio...

Check this out:
https://join.me/

It's brought to the guys from LogMeIn and it's free, though they do have a pro version with some additional features.

Thank You guys for all the information. I'm testing out several different options and discussing them with the group involved tonight.

Thanks again for the assistance.

Jamie

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Paw Dogs

You want a simple pragmatic solution not something that relies on stuffing video though network links of unknown quality. You said you had a 10K budget; buy a laptop and a portable projector and play your videos from that laptop.

I said that I can't support a 10K budget, but was not opposed to spending some money on a solution.

I think you must have misunderstood what I need; we are connecting with people all over the world, there will not even be 2 of us in the same city for the presentation / classes.

We're leaning towards running a live stream from a web cam on the presenter, then allowing questions and interaction via chat with the help of a moderator on the call. This should be much easier to setup, as the live video should be a fairly basic streaming / red5 setup with a linode and I think that I can do the audio with asterisk, but still need to research that a little more.

Thanks

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Paw Dogs

I feel like the simplest way to do this would to be use something like http://www.blip.tv or perhaps http://www.justin.tv to do this. I'm pretty sure that you can password protect your web feed if need be. These websites have a chat feature, but you could also just use IRC or something easier.

Thank You, I'll check them out. I checked out one such service that looked very promising, but in order to avoid having commercials come up during the middle of your presentation you had to subscribe to the premium version of the service that started at $350 /mo. $350 /mo buys a mighty big Linode. If it's going to cost something like that, I'm much rather give the business to Linode if I can.

I'll explore the 2 services you mention.

Thanks again
Jamie

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Paw Dogs