Yep missed the frying pan and landed in the fire! I upgraded my 13.2 Linux box to Leap 42.1 and keep getting an error saying could not open kwallet followed by could not connect to updates but kwallet does work for wifi access. Tightvnc, vnc, would not install and although showing krfb and krdc do not seem to function.
My friend 3000 miles away is running 13.2 set-up identical to my unit before I upgraded to leap 42.1. She doesn’t know much about computers and has messed things up loosing most of her data files. Testdisk has been tried by me on my machine and should be able to recover her files but I need to be able to sieze control of her desktop in order to fix things. It would also be very nice to prevent her from interupting my actions. 170 million text documents and pictures are gone.
Does there exist a remote desktop that will stop her from playing while I recover her files?
How do I install on leap 42.1 to control opensuse 13.2 desktop
How do I install on opensuse 13.2 locking out the user while I work
Unlike Windows, Linux at its core supports multiple simultaneous Users.
So, you can’t really prevent someone else from being logged in at the same time but on the other hand, it’s unlikely that anything they do(within reason) should interfere with what you do. But, to be safe, communicate with any other persons to avoid certain activities while you’re doing something you’d prefer should be uninterrupted (like rebooting the machine during a major file transfer)
Any of the most typical and ordinary options should work.
If you want to avoid possible graphical issues, SSH into the remote machine and execute command line.
But, you can also do a remote Desktop like VNC or X over SSH (there are other options as well).
Have you already been accessing the machine by remote Desktop or not?
You don’t.
But asking nicely can be very effective.
Nowadays, I’d recommend any of the commercial VoIP services, some well known free services include Skype, Google Talk and Hangouts.
That’s much simpler and likely better than configuring a private machine to machine application (but there are ways to send simple text messages if you have something like a VPN set up.
Back some years ago we used Teamviewer so I could teach and show her how to fix windows problems but had to give it up because even after telling her not to interrupt a copy or move or my navigation of her desktop she would see something like a picture or document she had been looking for and click to open. With slight time delay between our systems it was havoc with lots of lost files and damaged contents.
With millions of files now gone on her 2 PC’s and her back-up external hdd I see no option but to use remote desktop to recover them. She promises me that she will play nice this time and wait for me to finish. I guess first step is to syncronize our systems so I can install Teamviewer 12. Apparently we both must have at least Leap 42.2 on our machines as the needed library files are no longer available for 13.2 or 42.1. I don’t know SSH and tightvnc, realvnc, seam to have the same problem of unresolved dependencies.
Fwiw:
Her one Pc ran windows Vista with 3 data partitions and an os (C:) partition. Vista failed and destroyed the boot record and c: partition. The external back-up drive was attached and windows effectively messed it up too. She has a bootable usb with opensuse 13.2 on it so we were able to confirm testdrive can recover the files from all the partitions even though accessing the partitions in dolphin filemanger shows less than 1% still there.
Her other PC runs opensuse 13.2 and has a data partition softlinked to her home directory. She managed to kill many files on her data partition due to not understanding the difference between source and destination and waiting for copy and move operations to finish.
I hope to get an answer to another post so I can have her create a good usb flash drive to work from with leap 42.2. I also want to upgrade her working PC to Leap 42.2 and get testdrive and Teamviewer 12 working.
Took a quick look at nomachine and it looks promising if it can run on opensuse 13.2 without needing any additional libraries like Teamviewer needs. Can’t use leap 42.2 or 3 because they can’t run from usb only install from usb. Installation is not an option due to harddisk damage. I need to run from usb till files have been recovered, then I can look into putting in a new harddisk if the system board is not also failing.
opensuse took a major step back by going to an install only platform for leap 42.x . Live usb while not typical use is one big reason why I chose opensuse because I often deal with those that have trouble comprehending Linux stuff but need Linux power to fix problems.
After my prior post,
I remembered that although Linux is <normally> a multi-user system,
It’s possible to boot the system into Single User Mode.
Google “boot opensuse into single user mode” and you’ll get numerous hits.
Single User Mode isn’t typically run, but maybe you’ll find it addresses some of your concerns.