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Using-cage-for-a-seamless-RDP-Wayland-desktop.md (2512B)

    

  1. ---
  2. date: 2019-04-23
  3. layout: post
  4. title: Using Cage for a seamless remote Wayland session
  5. tags: ["wayland", "cage"]
  6. ---
  8. Congratulations to Jente Hidskes on [the first release of
  9. Cage](https://www.hjdskes.nl/blog/cage-01/)! Cage is a Wayland compositor
  10. designed for kiosks - though, as you'll shortly find out, is useful in many
  11. unexpected ways. It launches a single application, in fullscreen, and exits the
  12. compositor when that application exits. This lets you basically add a
  13. DRM+KMS+libinput session to any Wayland-compatible application (or X application
  14. via XWayland) and run it in a tiny wlroots compositor.
  16. I actually was planning on writing something like this at some point (for a
  17. project which still hasn't really come off the ground yet), so I was excited
  18. when Jente [announced it](https://www.hjdskes.nl/blog/cage/) in December. With
  19. the addition of the [RDP backend](https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/1578)
  20. in wlroots, I thought it would be cool to combine these to make a seamless
  21. remote desktop experience. In short, I installed
  22. [FreeRDP](http://www.freerdp.com/) and Cage on my laptop, and
  23. [sway](https://swaywm.org) on my desktop. On my desktop, I [generated TLS
  24. certificates per the wlroots
  25. docs](https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/blob/master/docs/env_vars.md#rdp-backend)
  26. and ran sway like so:
  28. ```sh
  29. WLR_RDP_TLS_CERT_PATH=$HOME/tls.crt \
  30. WLR_RDP_TLS_KEY_PATH=$HOME/tls.key \
  31. WLR_BACKENDS=rdp \
  32. sway
  33. ```
  35. Then, on my laptop, I can run this script:
  37. ```sh
  38. #!/bin/sh
  39. if [ $# -eq 0 ]
  40. then
  41. 	export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp
  42. 	exec cage sway-remote launch
  43. else
  44. 	sleep 3
  45. 	exec xfreerdp \
  46. 		-v homura \
  47. 		--bpp 32 \
  48. 		--size 1280x800 \
  49. 		--rfx
  50. fi
  51. ```
  53. The first branch is taken on the first run, and it starts up cage and asks it to
  54. run this script again. The second branch then starts up xfreerdp and connects to
  55. my desktop (its hostname is `homura`). xfreerdp is then fullscreened and all of
  56. my laptop's input events are directed to it. The result is an experience which
  57. is basically identical to running sway directly on my laptop, except it's
  58. actually running on my desktop and using the remote desktop protocol to send
  59. everything back and forth.
  61. This isn't especially practical, but it is a cool hack. It's definitely not
  62. network transparency like some people want, but I wasn't aiming for that. It's
  63. just a neat thing you can do now that we have an RDP backend for wlroots. And
  64. congrats again to Jente - be sure to give Cage a look and see if you can think
  65. of any other novel use-cases, too!