Raspberry Pi Clock Display and Connecting to Existing X11-Session

I recently bought a new Raspberry Pi 5 (RPi5) and I’ve been looking for something to do with my Raspberry Pi v3.

I found an older small TV that I had laying around and decided to set up a UTC clock in my BunShack (ham radio shack).

I know this is overkill for an Raspberry Pi v3, but it wasn’t doing anything else, and it gives it something to do while I work on additional plans for it.

Connecting to Existing X11-Session Remotely #

One of the challenges I ran into is that I wanted to control the display on the RPiv3 without having to change my keyboard and mouse from my primary BunShack computer to the RPiv3. I came across some instructions online on how to connect to an existing X11 session using TigerVNC.

Basically the gist of the solution is:

1. Install tigervnc-scraping-server on the host machine you want to connect to
2. Run mkdir ~/.vnc
3. Run vncpasswd
4. Finally run x0vncserver -rfbport 5901 -localhost yes -passwordfile ~/.vnc/passwd -display :0 on the host machine you want to connect to

Then when you are ready, to securely connect to the remote machine set up an SSH tunnel:

ssh -fX -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901 -C -N -l MYUSERNAME 192.168.1.100

Change the MYUSERNAME to your user on the remote machine, and change the 192.168.1.100 to the IP address of the machine running the X11-session you want to connect to.

Then on your local machine open vncviewer and connect to 127.0.0.1:5901.

You’ll be prompted for your vnc password you created earlier, so enter that.

There you go, you should now be able to connect to your remote machine securely.

I hope this helps somebody.

UPDATE (2023-12-23) #

I was pointed in the direction of HamClock on Mastodon, so I switched to using that on my Raspberry Pi.

73, K8VSY