Spice for Remote Access?

[MrGuvernment]

Hello all,

As I move more and more systems to Linux, being able to remote to them is next, versus having to use my proxmox interface or something else, as some of my VM's I will be using for actual interfacing.

Now I know there are the usual VNC options, but from reading, seems the geneal concensus is either the client/server is just dated, or performance / visual performance is not ideal to actually "use" them full time...

So, I started reading about using SPICE instead.. https://linuxvox.com/blog/spice-linux/

I currently do have Remmina installed, and the Spice SDK

I found Remmina works great and is butter smooth for my Windows VM's to remote to them over RDP protocol.

CachyOS is the base OS I am trying to and from..

I followed several guides, but, like many Linux guides, or PEBKAC, there is always too many assumptions, or steps missed it seems when people write said guides, or finding the alternative files and configs on Arch based distro's as many guides are written around Ubuntu..

Digging further, just installing spice it seems on the end you want to access, is not enough? Not just the spice-vdagent or sdk
https://archlinux.org/packages/?q=Spice

https://www.spice-space.org/spice-user-manual.html

Spice Server​

Spice server is implemented in libspice, a VDI pluggablelibrary. Currently, the main user of this library is QEMU. QEMU usesspice-server to provide remote access to virtual machines through theSpice protocol. Virtual Device Interface (VDI) defines a set ofinterfaces that provide a standard way to publish virtual devices(e.g. display device, keyboard, mouse) and enables different Spicecomponents to interact with those devices. On one side, the servercommunicates with the remote client using the Spice protocol and onthe other side, it interacts with the VDI host application (e.g QEMU).

https://linuxvox.com/blog/spice-linux/

Spice Server: It manages the local desktop environment and communicates with the Spice client over the network. On Linux, the Spice server is typically integrated with virtualization technologies like QEMU/KVM.

Thing is, on my main rig, I use VMware Workstation for some VMs also, so installing another virt layer last I tried, broke some stuff, but, I also should not need anything aside from the Spice packages installed

Has anyone here set up Spice to remote to/from linux systems and got it working?

I am sure I am missing something so basic!

 

[cjcox]

Sadly, it's "not basic", not anymore. If "single console" (Highlander style) is ok, and that console is "logged in" already, there can be "ways" of doing remote desktop that might/might not work reliably. My assessment of Linux today, is "remote desktop serving, just say no". Sadly a ton of work has been done to make this difficult and horrible. I'm talking true "remote desktop" and not some sort of view into the console head.

So, no, you're not missing something basic. This has gone from "fantastic" to "crap" with regards to "new Linux DE".

KDE 6 is really really bad. and as I mentioned, quite limited in that for completely unreliable and messed up "working" remote desktop, assumes you are logged into a KDE session already and have "allowed" remote desktop to use that session remotely. To say "it's gross" is a massive understatement. And even if you do get it to work, there are thousands of ways to completely screw it up, forcing some pretty bad recovery techniques to try an reestablish it (IMHO, bad enough to say, this is all fundamentally broken).

Gnome, apart from other problems you may have, it's "turn this thing on" capability for remote desktop is "better". But gone are the days of remote new multi-headed desktops under Linux (thank you Lennart and friends for "showing us the way").

And with that said, on the X11 is evil, death to X11, die, die, die, die side... but... you want something that works. As strange as it seems, you can make x2go (remnant of the old FreeNX) work with contemporary (emphasis) X11 KDE 6 today. Since I just did this setup (again) at least on the client side (me going from opensuse leap 16 to remote Tumbleweed) I can verify this mostly works. Again, the lords of Linux are trying to crap all of this out right now.... but, if WAN remoting that's efficient and still uses that old school "multi-user" remote desktop is interesting, the x2go solution does work (allows for ssh jump host tunneling, etc).

Will there be "something" in the future to allow Linux again to have "sane" true remote desktop serving capability? Unknown at this point. For now, if you can handle entering into an existing established session that has been "auth'd" to allow remote connections, this style is probably most stable in Gnome and works very very very stupidly and unreliably with KDE today.

Also, on the "old school" X11 die die die, etc... path, there's still Xvnc, which might provide "a path" of sorts. VNC can be tunneled to avoid the problem/reasons why it's hated so much.

When I hear "Spice remoting", that's usually not with regards to "remote desktop", but remote VM console (highlander one console head, etc.). Of course, I'm usually using Linux kvm as the hypervisor and Linux as the client, so Spice usually "just works". But using kvm, you can also go VNC for VM heads... so that you don't have to get virtviewer working on Windows clients (and use your favorite VNC client there).

Been a very very very very long time since I've used VMware Workstation as a hypervisor. So, I don't want to say what works best there.

I'll mention this, but this could just be a big bed of weeds... if you are doing GPU passthru, there's a possibility of things like sunshine and moonlight if on a low latency LAN. IMHO, this is a horse of a different color.

I do a lot of "this" sort of thing. It has gotten very very very gross over the past 5+ years though. I'm tired of "there's no valid use case", etc. Linux multi-user graphical desktop serving used to be huge.... But glad to have somebody show me "the better ways"... I just don't see it out there right now.

 

[Nobu]

So, Remmina is a remote desktop client, it supports

RDP, VNC, SPICE, X2Go, SSH, WWW (HTTP protocol) and EXEC network protocols are supported.

SPICE is a remote protocol for allowing access to virtual machines remotely. Generally, I think support would be built into your VM hypervisor (or program)

The spice-vdagent allows better integration (clipboard, etc) over spice connections. It doesn't facilitate those connections.

 

[Vermillion]

What are you doing on the other Linux systems that require a GUI?

I have 12 different servers in my homelab. All Linux based. I just SSH into them to do what I need. However, if I needed a GUI I'd probably use Rustdesk version 1.2 or higher since it supports Wayland. If you absolutely needed X11 just use X2go.

 

[MrGuvernment]

What are you doing on the other Linux systems that require a GUI?

I have 12 different servers in my homelab. All Linux based. I just SSH into them to do what I need. However, if I needed a GUI I'd probably use Rustdesk version 1.2 or higher since it supports Wayland. If you absolutely needed X11 just use X2go.

I do lots of isolation for little side projects, so I use browsers, discord and other apps for said projects. I like to keep them separate vs jumping back and forth between accounts on my main system, or having several browsers installed for different projects / logins. i also have several VLANs as well to isolate further based on what said VM needs access to.

I wanted to move said VMs to my proxmox host now, instead of continuing to run vmware workstation which just becomes a process every time kernel headers get updated in Linux because, as we know, Broadcom sucks , and If I can do it with out using Windows, even better!

 

[MrGuvernment]

So, Remmina is a remote desktop client, it supports

SPICE is a remote protocol for allowing access to virtual machines remotely. Generally, I think support would be built into your VM hypervisor (or program)

The spice-vdagent allows better integration (clipboard, etc) over spice connections. It doesn't facilitate those connections.

This makes sense, I think one place I was reading was a way to do a configuration with Remmina to basically use Proxmox as the "proxy" to then connect to systems via SPICE. I was hoping to be able to do some USB pass-through for things like my yubikey, but seems that can be a pain also

 

[MrGuvernment]

Sadly, it's "not basic", not anymore. If "single console" (Highlander style) is ok, and that console is "logged in" already, there can be "ways" of doing remote desktop that might/might not work reliably. My assessment of Linux today, is "remote desktop serving, just say no". Sadly a ton of work has been done to make this difficult and horrible. I'm talking true "remote desktop" and not some sort of view into the console head.

So, no, you're not missing something basic. This has gone from "fantastic" to "crap" with regards to "new Linux DE".

KDE 6 is really really bad. and as I mentioned, quite limited in that for completely unreliable and messed up "working" remote desktop, assumes you are logged into a KDE session already and have "allowed" remote desktop to use that session remotely. To say "it's gross" is a massive understatement. And even if you do get it to work, there are thousands of ways to completely screw it up, forcing some pretty bad recovery techniques to try an reestablish it (IMHO, bad enough to say, this is all fundamentally broken).

Gnome, apart from other problems you may have, it's "turn this thing on" capability for remote desktop is "better". But gone are the days of remote new multi-headed desktops under Linux (thank you Lennart and friends for "showing us the way").

And with that said, on the X11 is evil, death to X11, die, die, die, die side... but... you want something that works. As strange as it seems, you can make x2go (remnant of the old FreeNX) work with contemporary (emphasis) X11 KDE 6 today. Since I just did this setup (again) at least on the client side (me going from opensuse leap 16 to remote Tumbleweed) I can verify this mostly works. Again, the lords of Linux are trying to crap all of this out right now.... but, if WAN remoting that's efficient and still uses that old school "multi-user" remote desktop is interesting, the x2go solution does work (allows for ssh jump host tunneling, etc).

Will there be "something" in the future to allow Linux again to have "sane" true remote desktop serving capability? Unknown at this point. For now, if you can handle entering into an existing established session that has been "auth'd" to allow remote connections, this style is probably most stable in Gnome and works very very very stupidly and unreliably with KDE today.

Also, on the "old school" X11 die die die, etc... path, there's still Xvnc, which might provide "a path" of sorts. VNC can be tunneled to avoid the problem/reasons why it's hated so much.

When I hear "Spice remoting", that's usually not with regards to "remote desktop", but remote VM console (highlander one console head, etc.). Of course, I'm usually using Linux kvm as the hypervisor and Linux as the client, so Spice usually "just works". But using kvm, you can also go VNC for VM heads... so that you don't have to get virtviewer working on Windows clients (and use your favorite VNC client there).

Been a very very very very long time since I've used VMware Workstation as a hypervisor. So, I don't want to say what works best there.

I'll mention this, but this could just be a big bed of weeds... if you are doing GPU passthru, there's a possibility of things like sunshine and moonlight if on a low latency LAN. IMHO, this is a horse of a different color.

I do a lot of "this" sort of thing. It has gotten very very very gross over the past 5+ years though. I'm tired of "there's no valid use case", etc. Linux multi-user graphical desktop serving used to be huge.... But glad to have somebody show me "the better ways"... I just don't see it out there right now.

Facts...

I know my use case is likely more of a one off than the norm, but just being able to remote to system, but have it be basically "real time / bare metal" performance to linux may not be achievable to meet what I am used to using vmware workstation and VMs directly.

Time to play around and see what will work, and easily work as a set it and forget it...

 

[jardows]

Spice looks interesting, but looking at their downloads page, it appears as if it would primarily be used with QEMU, but some X11 servers exist. It appears that if you have Windows VM's, the only way you're going to connect to them using Spice is if they are hosted with QEMU.

You may need to re-think your strategy and look at the required workflow, and adapt your technology for your required work. It might be for your use case, RDP connections may be the best. I actually prefer to use xrdp over the built-in vmware client on my Mint, BSD, and Windows VM's. VNC has always been laggy to me, connecting to VM's or bare metal (primarily Mac). Of course this might require setting up X11 compatible environments for your Linux VM's, but if the end goal of work requires it, it might be faster and easier to get working than trying to force Wayland environments to play nicely. Granted, for my personal experience, I have not setup with Plasma, just XFCE, Cinnamon, and several legacy WM's.

 

[CrimsonKnight13]

SPICE works great with Proxmox VE, so that's probably the best route instead of hosting it locally even with libvirt or QEMU.