Re: X11 forwarding with headless Ubuntu host with podman

nwe <[email protected]> Mon, 25 May 2026 08:00:59 -0500

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 5/25/26 2:52 AM, Christian Gelinek wrote:

>
> I have some software with X11 GUI I'd like to run inside podman 
> containers on machine octopus. The octopus host itself should be as 
> minimal and as disposable as practical and only be used as a gateway 
> to the software in the containers.  Previously it was enough to have a 
> few real metal PCs (like marlin) with a full-blown desktop environment 
> but recently the number of OS variants has been increasing and I'd 
> like to save resources by using containers instead, where I'm hoping 
> that trying & installing new OS distributions and versions would be 
> less hassle and costly than dealing with real metal for each combination.
>
Not sure if the following would serve your purpose; it probably takes 
more resources than your attempted method. What I've been doing: 
Headless server running virsh virtual machines. The hardware is a 10 
year old dual-CPU rack server with 256GB RAM and ~30TB hard drive pool 
so all kinds of capacity to play with.

I used boxes and virtualbox al long time ago but those had various 
problems, I don't recall all the details, I think boxes was randomly 
crashing for me and virtualbox kept fighting my preference of monitor 
size in the vm. With both of those I was running the server with a 
desktop environment. Virsh I administrate entirely via ssh to the 
headless host.

I run virtual machines: Windows 10, multiple versions of Ubuntu and 
Debian, and a couple other odd distros, all at once, and connect to 
their desktop via vnc over my internal lan. I've learned to start 
including the vnc port in the vm name to help myself remember for 
example, that vm ReactOs5915 has its gui on port 5915.

A server with much less resources should handle the same virtual 
machines if you only run one or a few at a time. As long as the cpu 
supports virtualization, I've run a vm on a host with 4GB RAM.

I used to think virtual machines take a huge performance hit compared to 
real hardware, but that seems to have significantly improved in recent 
years.

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