Show HN: Tux.io – a (now working) Linux desktop in your browser | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Tux.io – a (now working) Linux desktop in your browser

tux.io

64 pointschristux16 comments

For a different (and incomplete) take on a Linux Desktop in the browser permit me to plug my own project that I work on in my spare time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7namj7iy16Y

https://github.com/Lerc/notanos

This takes the approach of Still having Linux, but instead of transferring an X display to the browser, the browser supplants X. Consequently X apps don't run, but HTML/JS apps are really easy to make.

Connections are still made in a manner similar to X. A socket is available on the Unix side which apps can connect to, which tunnels through an open websocket connection.

So basically, ChromeOS.

In the terminal, Tux still ignores keystrokes that have meaning in Firefox such as \#h (switch tab left) and \#l (switch tab right). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14077797

Are you using Pentadactyl, or something? Those are not stock Firefox shortcuts. In any case, I'd investigate whatever addon provides them, to see how they're implemented and why they're conflicting with whatever Tux.io is doing to capture keystrokes.

Looks like it is Firemacs and I've been using it so long that I never realized those shortcuts were tied to it. Thanks.

That looks nifty, but I'm hesitant at this point to try any addon that's not e10s-compatible, since support will be going away soon and I'm not interested in losing e10s in any case.

Does someone here know of something similar that works with the new API?

The Firemacs repository looks fairly readable. I wonder what it would it takes to make a project like this work with e10s.

https://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/Firemacs

Based on the API documentation, I think it could be done by combining a content script to capture keystrokes and a background script to call browser APIs that a content script can't access.

There'd be a number of edge cases to deal with, of course, and I'm sure Firemacs already handles at least some of them. I'll take a closer look, as soon as I can get Firefox to tell me what's "invalid" about the PoC extension I'm hacking on, and load it so I can try it out.

Nice thing. Can I also stream the audio?

Thanks and sorry, not yet. Email features@tux.io if you want this to be considered for the road-map.

This is very cool. Whats is the technology behind this ?

It feels like guacamole remote desktop https://guacamole.incubator.apache.org/

What is the tux password (sudo) ?

It runs noVNC, an HTML5 vnc client https://kanaka.github.io/noVNC/

It's really running VNC protocol over websockets, where guacamole has a custom protocol.

How come? This is not running in Javascript, is it?

It seems to be a browser based VNC client connecting to a remote VM running linux.

Is is possible to run this on my own hosts?

you should compile linux to Wasm and make the HTML side of things just render the framebuffer.

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