Blog of spblinux

Xen virtual machines transmit their screen contents by vnc. A browser based viewer is the java vnc viewer plugin (see previous post). Advantage of java is that it runs on many platforms. However java tends to use a lot of RAM. On ubuntu 10.04 there is an alternative browser plugin which is gtk based: gtk viewer plugin.

The gtk vnc plugin offers only very basic functions: just an authentication dialog and the vnc viewer window. – This post adds a minimalistic toolbar to the plugin (test.html, gtk-vnc-plugin.so, libgtk-vnc-1.0.so.0.0.1).

Steps to build the plugin described above:

• Start with debian sid source package of gtk-vnc (local copies: gtk-vnc_0.3.10.orig.tar.gz, gtk-vnc_0.3.10-6.diff.gz, gtk-vnc_0.3.10-6.dsc)
• Download color toolbar patches:colortoolbar.patch.gz, colortoolbar2.patch.gz
• Inside download directory run
  tar -xzf gtk-vnc_0.3.10.orig.tar.gz
  zcat gtk-vnc_0.3.10-6.diff.gz |patch -p0
  zcat colortoolbar.patch.gz |patch -p0
  zcat colortoolbar2.patch.gz |patch -p0     (updated: more)
  cd gtk-vnc-0.3.10
  chmod +x debian/rules
  ./debian/rules binary
• Result: gtk-vnc-plugin.so and libgtk-vnc-1.0.so.0.0.1
• but it runs only with libgtk-vnc from debian lenny gtk-vnc library (using gtk-vnc-3.8: libgtk-vnc-1.0.so.0.0.1) – gtk-vnc-3.10 has introduced some incompatibility with gtk vnc plugin (does not display hvm virtual machines after second connection); this is solved by patch 0102-libgtk-vnc_revert_to_v3.8_format_selection.diff (which is included in colortoolbar.patch.gz)
• the deb archives created by debian/rules binary have to be installed with
  dpkg -i libgtk-vnc-1.0-0_0.3.10-6_amd64.deb mozilla-gtk-vnc_0.3.10-6_amd64.deb
• to protect these manually installed packages they should be protected in synaptic with menu Package/Force version
• amd64 versions of the created deb archives can be found here:
  libgtk-vnc-1.0-0_0.3.10-6_amd64.deb mozilla-gtk-vnc_0.3.10-6_amd64.deb python-gtk-vnc_0.3.10-6_amd64.deb libgtk-vnc-1.0-dev_0.3.10-6_amd64.deb gvncviewer_0.3.10-6_amd64.deb libgtk-vnc-1.0-0-dbg_0.3.10-6_amd64.deb