Since I closed my computer business in 2007 and started spending all my time concentrating on learning how to live with recovering from all the injuries, then two lots of open heart surgery and a couple of brain injures, so much has happened. Now that I reached retirement age, I have other challenges.
Cyclone Ului in 2010 and Cyclone Debbie in 2017 destroyed my yachts in Shute Harbour, and with them, the part time live aboard lifestyle i was enjoying. Changes in my personal life as well as Australian Government legislation changes, followed by the 2017 medical emergency and surgery meant my retirement plan, to live on the resort I helped set up in the Philippines, is no longer viable.
Now I'm relegated to living in what used to be my computer workshop and classroom. While I have always had computers (since the 1970s) I have rarely been interested in them as anything more than a work tool.
Now I am beginning to 'enjoy' aspects of computing that I previously only bothered with for 'work'.
This blog is testament to my keeping computers around, and to my still experimenting with different aspects of the things. However over the last week I have done something I never bothered to do when I was working.
I set up a Home Network. Not only that, instead of having several computers on one desk, each with its own dedicated tasks and its own monitor, I have three computers connected to one monitor (a 55 inch TV) by a different HDMI port each.
I didn't bother with a network, because as before, I didn;t need one. I could do everything from one computer. The m93 has become my everyday computer because the i5 processor is a little more powerful and responsive than the Brix' Celeron. The Raspberry Pi was just there because, well, it's a Raspberry Pi.
Last week, the Realtek sound chip in the m93p lost a channel. I liesten to music a lot. Like, 'all the time'. I have several mp3 devices, some hooked up to dedicated speaker systems. But having the m93 unable to play music or show a video irked me.
Obviously I could play music on the BRIX or the Pi, but then I had to switch HDMI ports every time I wanted to adjust the volume. Something had to change.
I remembered VNC. If I set the BRIX up as a VNC Server, I could view and control it through a window in one of the Virtual Desktops (Workspaces) in the m93p. That would allow me to control the volkume, and the playlist etc. from the m93p, without the hassle of grabbing the remote and swapping HDMI inputs to the screen, and grabbing another keyboard and mouse to drive the BRIX.
It should have been dead easy.
It wasn't.
Linux has plenty of VNC server programs available. It also has a number of VNC viewers. I installed several servers one at a time on the BRIX, and viewers, one at a time on the m93p to test each server. The viewers on the m93p were not seeing any of the servers I installed on the BRIX,
Then while I had the tigerVNC-scrapin-server running on the BRIX, and I installed a remote viewer I had not noticed in the repositories, called 'vinagre' on the m93p.
Immediately it recognised the IP address I typed in as the Host, as the BRIX, and opened a window to its Desktop.
I installed tigerVNC-scraping-server on the Pi as well, and that was also immediately found and opened.
In the next post, I'll try to lay out the steps I went through to set this up.
