Accessing your remote Ubuntu machine with VNC and ssh

Leave a reply

If you want to access your remote Ubuntu machine with VNC, in particular by tunnelling through ssh, there is already some documentation which can be found here. However, at least for me, the procedure explained there does not work out of the box. So here’s what I had to do to make it work.

First of all you need to install in the machines the following packages:

  • remote machine: xvfb x11vnc openssh-server
  • local machine: xtightvncviewer openssh-client

Then, the script to run on your client machine to access the server has to be slightly modified as follows

#!/bin/sh

ssh -C -f -L 5900:localhost:5900 USER@REMOTEIP \
        x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once \
        -auth /home/USER/.Xauthority -display :0 -create \
        && sleep 5 \
        && vncviewer localhost:0

where you will have to replace USER with your user on the remote machine, and REMOTEIP with the address of your remote machine.

Basically, the changes I had to make to the original script were to add the -auth command line option specifying the path to the .Xauthority, and the command line option -create to actually start an instance of the X server on the remote machine.

Be Sociable, Share!

Using Buckminster Plugin in Jenkins

2 Replies

The bugs described in this post are now fixed (since I became the new maintainer of this plugin :)

If you use Buckminster for your builds, and have a personal Jenkins build system, you might want to rely on the Buckminster Plugin, which can be installed directly from Jenkins:

Unfortunately this plugin has some bugs (at least two) which somehow prevent you from using it, especially for new Eclipse versions. But it is quite easy to fix them once you know how; I found the solutions on the web, but I thought I could summarize them here to have them in one place.

First, if you’re not using Internet Explorer, then you’ll not be able to add build steps (which makes the plugin useless :)

As documented in the bug report (not yet fixed): you need to edit this file (all paths are intended to be prefixed with your Jenkins path)

plugins/buckminster/WEB-INF/classes/hudson/plugins/buckminster/EclipseBuckminsterBuilder/config.jelly

and “remove the <f:section></f:section> tags which surround the <f:advanced> entries”. This is expressed by this diff with the original file

*** config.jelly        2012-05-11 22:13:59.000000000 +0200
--- config.jelly~       2011-04-01 00:30:56.000000000 +0200
***************
*** 46,52 ****
     <f:entry title="${%Script File}" field="userCommand" help="${rootURL}/plugin/buckminster/help-customCommand.html">
         <f:textbox  name="userCommand"  value="${instance.getUserCommand()}" />
     </f:entry>
! 
      <f:advanced>
                <f:entry title="${%Change Workspace}" help="${rootURL}/plugin/buckminster/help-customWorkspace.html">
                <f:textbox name="userWorkspace" value="${instance.getUserWorkspace()}" />
--- 46,52 ----
     <f:entry title="${%Script File}" field="userCommand" help="${rootURL}/plugin/buckminster/help-customCommand.html">
         <f:textbox  name="userCommand"  value="${instance.getUserCommand()}" />
     </f:entry>
!    <f:section title="Advanced Options">
      <f:advanced>
                <f:entry title="${%Change Workspace}" help="${rootURL}/plugin/buckminster/help-customWorkspace.html">
                <f:textbox name="userWorkspace" value="${instance.getUserWorkspace()}" />
***************
*** 67,71 ****
                <f:textarea name="equinoxLauncherArgs" value="${instance.getEquinoxLauncherArgs()}" />
                 </f:entry>
     </f:advanced>
! 
  </j:jelly>
\ No newline at end of file
--- 67,71 ----
                <f:textarea name="equinoxLauncherArgs" value="${instance.getEquinoxLauncherArgs()}" />
                 </f:entry>
     </f:advanced>
! </f:section>
  </j:jelly>

Then, with the default configuration of the plugin, you won’t be able to install a recent version of Buckminster, thus you need to provide a custom .json (to put in userContent/buckminster/buckminster.json) file to allow new versions of Buckminster to be installed (an older example is found here); this is the json file I use:

{"buckminsters":[
       {"id":"3.7",
         "name":"Buckminster 3.7",
         "url":"http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/eclipse/tools/buckminster/products/director_latest.zip",
         "iu":"org.eclipse.buckminster.cmdline.product",
         "repositoryURL":"http://download.eclipse.org/tools/buckminster/headless-3.7",
         "repositories":[
               { "url":"http://download.eclipse.org/tools/buckminster/headless-3.7",
                   "features":[
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.core.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.cvs.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.emma.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.git.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.maven.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.pde.headless.feature"}
                  ]},

                  {"url":"http://download.cloudsmith.com/buckminster/external-3.7",
                   "features":[
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.subclipse.headless.feature"}
                  ]
              }
         ]
     },

	{"id":"4.2",
         "name":"Buckminster 4.2",
         "url":"http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/eclipse/tools/buckminster/products/director_latest.zip",
         "iu":"org.eclipse.buckminster.cmdline.product",
         "repositoryURL":"http://download.eclipse.org/tools/buckminster/headless-4.2",
         "repositories":[
               { "url":"http://download.eclipse.org/tools/buckminster/headless-4.2",
                   "features":[
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.core.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.cvs.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.git.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.maven.headless.feature"},
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.pde.headless.feature"}
                  ]},

                  {"url":"http://download.cloudsmith.com/buckminster/external-4.2",
                   "features":[
                       {"id":"org.eclipse.buckminster.subclipse.headless.feature"}
                  ]
              }
         ]
     }
  ]
}

Hope this helps :)

Be Sociable, Share!

Back from EclipseCon Europe 2012

Leave a reply

I’m really sad that EclipseCon Europe has already finished, it has been a wonderful edition with lots of very interesting presentations!

My favourite ones were:

And last but not least… “be nice to nerds…” :)

Be Sociable, Share!

Installing Eclipse Features via the command line

2 Replies

If you have many eclipse installations (with different features/plugins) and you want to have such installations in several computers (possibly with different operating systems or with different architectures), then being able to install eclipse features from the command line might be quite helpful (at least, it is for me :)

You can find some related posts, like Lars Vogel’s or Paul Webster’s. These are just my two cents :)

What you need to do is to run eclipse from the command line (if you’re using Windows, you need to run eclipsec.exe, note the final ‘c’, instead of eclipse.exe), with these parameters

./eclipse \
-clean -purgeHistory \
-application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director \
-noSplash \
-repository <repo1>,<repo2>,<repo3> \
-installIUs <feature1>,<feature2>,<feature3>,...

Where the repo URLs are just the same as the ones you use as update sites or p2 repositories when installing a feature in Eclipse (you may want to always put the eclipse distribution main update site, e.g., http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno), while the feature IDs are the actual identifiers of features you want to install; knowing the correct feature ID might not be immediate to discover, if you’re only used to the names you see in the update manager.

For instance, say that you want to install Xtext SDK, from the site http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/tmf/xtext/updates/composite/releases/ , then in Eclipse you would do something like in the following screenshot

but instead of “Xtext SDK“, in the command line, you should specify org.eclipse.xtext.sdk.feature.group. While in this case it was easy to infer the feature ID, but… at least for me, it was not immediate to know that “Eclipse Java EE Developer Tools” feature is indeed org.eclipse.jst.enterprise_ui.feature.feature.group !!! :)

Fortunately, you can get to know that by clicking that “More…” link in the above screenshot, which leads you an information dialog where you can easily find the identifier of the selected feature:

Of course you can also have the list of all the contents of an update site, by using the option -list:

./eclipse \
-clean -purgeHistory \
-application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director \
-noSplash \
-repository <repo1> -list

For instance, this is the command line I use to install in the Xtext eclipse distribution (http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/download.html) additional stuff like the Xpand SDK, some Mylyn connectors, SwtBot and EMF CDO:

./eclipse \
-clean -purgeHistory \
-application org.eclipse.equinox.p2.director \
-noSplash \
-repository \

http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/tmf/xtext/updates/composite/releases/,\


http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno,\


http://download.eclipse.org/technology/swtbot/helios/dev-build/update-site,\

http://update.atlassian.com/atlassian-eclipse-plugin/e3.8 \
-installIUs \
org.eclipse.xpand.sdk.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.swtbot.eclipse.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.swtbot.eclipse.test.junit4.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.swtbot.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.swtbot.forms.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.swtbot.ide.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.egit.mylyn.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.bugzilla_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.builds.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.context_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.discovery.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.gerrit.feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.git.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.github.feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.hudson.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.ide_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.java_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.monitor.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.pde_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.tasks.ide.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.team_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.trac_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn.wikitext_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.mylyn_feature.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.emf.cdo.sdk.feature.group,\
org.eclipse.emf.query.sdk.feature.group,\
com.atlassian.connector.eclipse.jira.feature.group \
-vmargs -Declipse.p2.mirrors=true -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

The final -vmargs are just some additional arguments which you may want to skip.

Hope this helps :)

Be Sociable, Share!