31st March 2022 - VNC Tinkerings
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Listening to an old Tob recording seeing as he is otherwise occupied.

The past few days have been spent giving Manjaro on Raspberry Pi a go. 
I have had a Raspberry Pi 4 kicking around mostly acting as a 
noiseless bridge between my PC and Icom IC-705 for digi-modes. It 
feels like a waste for all those times I am not playing with amateur 
radio. I also had a strange idea.... I have a HP Pavillion x2 which 
has 2 GB RAM and so struggles with most browsers. It has a nice life 
as my SDF machine but what if I could use it as an intelligent 
terminal... As much as Raspian/Raspberry Pi OS is functional, I have a 
special place in my heart for Manjaro. It is my distro of choice as it 
gives a lot of freedom with default set ups and the shiny rolling 
release without too many headaches thing. I know it is Arch for babies 
who like green too much but still. There was also a nagging thought 
that a USB boot would be preferable too. 

For a challenge, I tried to do this without connecting a screen etc or 
using another computer. With the use of wget and a fresh USB stick, I 
got manjaro sway installed. Then I had to connect the pi to a screen, 
keyboard and mouse. I forgot there would have to be first time set up. 
Sigh. Sway seemed to struggle to work out which half of the DE should 
be on the left and on the right. I ended up with some weird effect 
where the time appeared in the middle and the menu button was to the 
right of that. A swath of the middle was missing for some reason. A 
reboot and it worked for a bit. Another reboot and it returned to 
being confused. So I resorted to good old trusty XFCE. That installed 
fine.

With the pi, I wanted it to act as a headless computer which I could 
VNC into. Manjaro does not make this easy. I can see why RealVNC is 
installed from the off in Raspberry Pi OS. After playing with tigervnc 
and x11vnc, following the good old Arch wiki pages, I hit a strange 
snag. I was able to connect to a session but not click on anything. 
After much harumphing and searching the manjaro forums, I found I have 
to enable the systemd service everytime the pi reboots and then I can 
actually click on things. Why? Who knows. I have a script to ensure I 
never forget that step now. Now the challenge was whether I could get 
this working from outside the LAN, something I had never really played 
with other than using pagekite. Port forwarding over SSH was also 
something I had not tried but obviously wanted for security reasons. 
Well that all happened fairly easily. Other than much mucking around 
with the router settings and some scary moments where I managed to 
stop the sshf service through an out of range port. This would be 
simple to remedy if I had not forgotten to start the service again. I 
instead kept wondering why enable would not work. Sigh. Stupidity. 
Anyhow, I am now able to use VNC to connect to the PI securly from 
outside the network. My SDF machine can go on the road now and be 
useful for more than text. 

This HP x2 was a purchase I regretted for a long time. It has 32 GB of 
memory as was typical of these cheap pieces of crap to lure the daft 
with at the time. This was no good for windows. However, there was 
also an added trick to make alternative OS' a problem. The bootloader 
is 32 bit while the processor is 64 bit. Why? WHO KNOWS?!?!? It took a 
long time for linux distros to resolve this matter and make me happy 
again. Some would wonder why I bothered. The hardware is spot on. It 
is a 10 inch screen with a surprisingly nice keyboard. It uses USB C 
for the charger. It has a reasonable battery. The bootloader and RAM 
are the only issues really and they are mostly solved. There is the 
lack of sound due to Intel processor madness too but I have bluetooth 
working for sound. Yet for all of the issues, I am glad that I can 
still use this machine. I have learned a lot from it over the years 
and hopefully can keep it going for many more.