Building Xpra on Raspbian

For general information, see wiki/Building first.

Introduction

These instructions are valid for Raspbian Stretch and are based on this gist: ​Installing Xpra on a Raspberry Pi from Source and #1777.

Install The Dependencies

Install these dependencies as root:

• build dependencies:

  apt-get install libx11-dev libxtst-dev libxcomposite-dev \
      libxdamage-dev libxkbfile-dev xauth x11-xkb-utils xserver-xorg-video-dummy \
      python-all-dev python-gobject-dev python-gtk2-dev cython \
      libx264-dev libvpx-dev node-uglify yui-compressor
  

• decent set of runtime dependencies:

  apt-get install python-lz4 python-cryptography
  pip install pyopengl pyopengl-accelerate rencode \
      netifaces websocket-client websockify pillow
  

Xpra Source

Download the latest source release from https://xpra.org/src/ or even the current development version (wiki/Source), build it and install it (as root). ie for xpra-2.2.5.tar.xz:

wget https://xpra.org/src/xpra-2.2.5.tar.xz
tar -Jxf xpra-2.2.5.tar.xz
rm xpra-2.2.5.tar.xz
cd xpra-2.2.5/
python2 ./setup.py build
python2 ./setup.py install

Fixup Xvfb Path

The Raspbian Stretch distribution is based on Debian Stretch, but uses different Xorg workarounds, so we have to manually update the Xorg path detected during the build.

Edit /usr/local/etc/xpra/conf.d/55_server_x11.conf and change:

xvfb = /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -noreset -novtswitch ... etc

to

xvfb = /usr/bin/Xorg -noreset -novtswitch ... etc

displayfd workaround

Because of the Raspberry Pi's limited resources, getting an answer from displayfd might take more than the ten seconds specified as the standard timeout. In order to change this, you can start xpra like this:

XPRA_DISPLAY_FD_TIMEOUT=30 xpra start ...

Alternatively, always specify a display when use the xpra "start" subcommand.