Vinagre Lets Me Use the GUI

Android has a beautiful GUI. It's what I use on my phone and tablet to do everything. The Beaglebone is headless. Now what?

The solution is remote-desktop sharing, using Virtual Network Computing (VNC), which lets me share desktops over a network.

Of course, the serial connection isn't a network, but never mind about that.

The current Ubuntu VNC client is vinagre. Android ships with a VNC server, imaginatively named androidvncserver.

So, taking this as an opportunity to use the Android Derbug Bridge (adb), I first go onto the target, then launch the server

$ adb shell # on the host, gets me a root prompt on the target
# androidvncserver &

Next, back on the host, I use adb again, to fake up a "network" connection to the server. VNC talks on port 5901, so I tunnel tcp traffic between that port on the host, over a serial, adb connection, to the same port on the target board. The VNC client and server think they're talking over a network, adb is handling the traffic.

$ adb forward tcp:5901 tcp:5901

Cool, huh?

Finally, all I have to do is launch vinagre on my netbook, choose the VNC protocol (I check "Use JPEG Compression" to make things a little faster), and connect to localhost:5901.

Presto! The screen fills with a familiar Android display.

Not only does this impress me, it everyone I show in their tracks. This is the "Aha!" experience for this course. This headless little board, though looking nothing like a phone or a tablet and lacking both keyboard and display, is uncontestably running Android.