I finally got round to finding, and fiddling with, an Apache Guacamole container that I could actually make sense of and it seems to work, with audio, when connecting to my demo RobotLab/Wine RDP desktop.
The container I tried is based on the Github repo oznu/docker-guacamole.
The container is started with:
mkdir guac_config docker run -p 8080:8080 -v guac_config:/config oznu/guacamole
Login with user name and password guacadmin.
I then launched a RobotLab container that is running an RDP server:
docker run --name tm129 --hostname tm129demo --shm-size 1g -p 3391:3389 -d ousefulcoursecontainers/tm129rdp
Inside Guacamole, we need to create a new connection profile. From the admin drop down menu, select Settings, click on the Connections tab and create a New Connection:
Given the connection a name and specify the protocol as RDP:
The connection settings require the IP address and port noumber that the connection is to be made on. The port mapping was specified when we started the RobotLab container (3391) but what’s the network address? If we try to claim “localhost” in the Guacamole container, that refers the container’s localhost, not localhost on host. On a Mac, we can pick up the host IP address from the Network panel in the System Preferences:
Enter the appropriate connection parameters and save them:
From the admin menu, select Home. From the home screen you should be able to select the new connection…
When the connection is opened, I was presented with a warning dialogue:
but clicking OK cleared it okay…
Then I could enter the RobotLab RDP connection details (username and password are both ubuntu):
and I was in to the desktop.
The application files can be found within the File System in the /opt directory.
As mentioned previously, the base container needs some fettling… When you first run the RobotLab or Neural applications, Wine wants to do some updates (which requires a network connection). If I could figure out how to create users in the base image, rather than user creation occurring as part of the entrypoint, following the recipe here.
Although it’s a little bit ropey, the Guacamole desktop does play out audio.
RobotLab has three instructions for playing audio: sound, send and tone. The sound and send commands play an audio file, and this works, sort of (the spoken works played using the send command are, erm, very robotic!). The tone command doesn’t work, but I’ve seen in docs that this was an outstanding issue for some versions of Windows, so maybe it doesn’t work properly under Wine anyway…
Finally, I note that if you leave the remote desktop running, a screensaver kicks in…
Although the audio support isn’t brilliant (maybe there are “settings” in the container config that can improve it?) the support is more or less good enough, as is, for audio feedback / beeps etc. And just about good enough for the RobotLab activities.
What this means is that now I do have a route for running RobotLab, via a browser, with sort of desktop support.
One other thing to note relates to the network addressing. If I start the Guacamole and RobotLab containers together via a docker-compose.yml file, I’m guessing I should be able to define a Docker Compose network to connect them and use that as the network address/alias name in the Guacamole connection setting?
But I’m creatively drained atm and can’t face trying to get anything else working today…
PS another remote desktop protocol, SPICE, which I found via mentions in OpenStack docs…: [t]he SPICE project aims to provide a complete open source solution for remote access to virtual machines in a seamless way so you can play videos, record audio, share usb devices and share folders without complications [docs and a simple looking howto]. Not sure how deprecated / live this is?
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