Keep GUI app running after vncserver shutdown

Question

I am trying to do the following:

1. Connect through SSH to an Amazon EC2 instance
2. Start a VNC server
3. Connect through VNC
4. Start a GUI application and log in
5. Kill the VNC server but keep the GUI application running.

I don't need to ever interact with the GUI application after I log in. Can this be done?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, I don't think that you can do that, but why don't use $ssh -Y user@machine to be able to use the graphical user interface through ssh?

Answer 2

I followed the instructions here:

Dropped ssh/X session, how to pickup where left off?

and it worked. xpra seems to be a good solution.

Answer 3

You could take a look at xrdp. xrdp starts a VNC server in the background and provides an RDP interface for you to connect to. If you use the same screen resolution and color settings, you will reconnect the same session behind the RDP server.

Be aware however, if you use a different screen resolution, you will end up with two different VNC sessions running on the same machine. If you have applications that can only run in one instance (Skype, etc), you will not be able to launch them on the second instance.