Linux – VNC Server for a Headless Debian box

debiandebian-wheezylinuxvnc

Which VNC Server can I use to run graphical applications (i.e. X Clients) on a headless Debian Wheezy box?

Usually I don't need graphical applications on servers but from time to time there are applications (e.g. firmware update utilities) which sadly required a graphical interface.

Best Answer

You don't need VNC or even to run X via a service, though X and whatever gnome-visual stuff will get installed along with your visual program. I use aptitude to install to keep an eye on the dependencies.

I use graphical apps via ssh from home all the time without doing anything special, just use ssh -X as you would ssh before. Once logged in, you background the task, example:
$ midori &
and then the window eventually appears just as if it were your local machine.

I do it mostly for getting a browser inside the network to manage something. The last time, I previously used firefox, but my new Debian install is without anything.

One tool I did really like and enjoy was opening xfce-panel on the server from my linux desktop, in which I had a few different useful plugins, including hardware monitoring. Sometimes gedit would come in handy when I knew there'd be many edits and it seemed faster to start a new shell with -X and then background the GUI rather than just use vi.

Edit to add: You reminded me I needed an internal browser, so from home I just installed a bunch of browsers on my work's host & midori is the best I have tried yet. Netsurf couldn't open webmin, arora was way too slow, & epiphany was slower than normal to show GUI input.

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linux – Disk Usage Treemap Software for Headless Linux

NCurses Disk Usage (ncdu) is good for this. See http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu for details. It's available as a package for most popular distributions and lets you browse and find out where your disk space is used. It uses text characters to display a bar-chart of directory usage so you get a semi-graphical interface, in a text only environment.

Linux – How to run a command multiple times, using bash shell

I don't think a command or shell builtin for this exists, as it's a trivial subset of what the Bourne shell for loop is designed for and implementing a command like this yourself is therefore quite simple.

Per JimB's suggestion, use the Bash builtin for generating sequences:

for i in {1..10}; do command; done

For very old versions of bash, you can use the seq command:

for i in `seq 10`; do command; done

This iterates ten times executing command each time - it can be a pipe or a series of commands separated by ; or &&. You can use the $i variable to know which iteration you're in.

If you consider this one-liner a script and so for some unspecified (but perhaps valid) reason undesireable you can implement it as a command, perhaps something like this on your .bashrc (untested):

#function run
run() {
    number=$1
    shift
    for i in `seq $number`; do
      $@
    done
}

Usage:

run 10 command

Example:

run 5 echo 'Hello World!'

Best Answer

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