Struggling to run VNC/RDP on Fedora 41

Ask Fedora
, , , , ,
1

Good day.

My question would be the following - what to actually run on Fedora 41 KDE for a remote desktop connection (on a system with a “tight budget” in terms of performance)?

I have a CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) Silver N6005 @ 2.00GHz (x4) based SBC(Odroid H3+) with 16gb of ram, which is used as a lab.

After going through a headache of How to fully disable sleep related functions? - #7 by draakzward , which “resolved” itself after I unplugged the monitor, I started looking for a remote desktop solution.

The system is running KDE with Wayland, so I tried kRDP. That one, after I solved the “black screen” with reinstalling the h264(or was it 265..) codec, turned out having two problems:

  1. The cpu usage goes to 80+ percent, and same for the ram (seems to be S\W encoding due to either a wrong h264 codec installed, or the H\W capabilities of the sbc). As a result, it was sluggish beyond my comfort.
  2. It still returned to the default “black screen” behavior after some time (could be related to the upper topic… I don’t know anymore).

So I turned it down, and decided to give VNC a try.

For the VNC I used TigerVNC, for which I basically followed the TigerVNC :: Fedora Docs,

so:

  1. dnf install
  2. set the user in vncserver.users
  3. vncpasswd
  4. run the service

Later I found about the xsession, so I installed xorg-x11-xinit-session following the advice from:

Got an xinit-compatible.session in the relevant directory (it is hard typing all of this from my main machine… without having the bash history), so I tried setting this value in the vncserver-defaults... config to both kde and xinit-compatible. No game.

Later I realized that stopping the service still had the connection open. There I learned vncserver -kill. After which I started questioning how it started, how it worked… and how to make it work again. The service goes dead on start, with no distinct error I could hook up to.

From there I once again started googling, which lead me to a forum post about using freeRDP, which made a full circle, leading me back to kRDP.

2

Fedora 41 is out of support, you might want to upgrade to Fedora 42 or Fedora 43 and try again on those. KRDP seems to be under very active development and has seen updates to newer versions on Fedora 42. I highly recommend updating to the latest versions before wasting time to work around or investigate issues which probably have been fixed somewhere already.

1 Like
3

I understand that, but this is my homelab system, which is running my smarthome projects and quite a few other things. And I quite remember installing some update, which simply stopped booting the system at all for some reason (which ended up in a full reinstall of the system due to my limited Linux and Fedora knowledge).

Plus, if to avoid the fact that every time I need to connect to the lab pc, I manually plug in the hdmi cable, I have a system where everything just works.

So I really would like to have the “update to Fedora 42/43” as a last resort (Fedora is my favoured distro, but stuff like hooking up kb and mouse to a small sbc, which is not easy to reach, to do a reinstall, is quite an exhausting act on its own)