Procedure to enable interactive desktop (XFCE) on rocky8

General Discussion
1

Dear All,

I’ve taken the liberty of providing you with the whole procedure, I need to apply to get XFCE desktop work with rocky and ood. I hope it will help:

Deploy xfce4 on rocky8 cluster

  1. Defined your cluster in /etc/ood/confid/cluster.d:
(baobab)-[root@oodx~]$ cat /etc/ood/config/clusters.d/baobab.yaml 
# /etc/ood/config/clusters.d/my_cluster.yml
---
v2:
  metadata:
    title: "Baobab"
  login:
    host: "oodx"
  job:
    adapter: "slurm"
    bin: "/usr/bin"

  1. Install XFCE on the compute node you will run the (desktop) job:
    I use this procedure:
    XFCE Desktop - Documentation

  2. Edit again the cluster.d/cluster.yaml This is the most important step, otherwise it won’t work and you’ll get a vncserver: command not found in your job output:

(baobab)-[root@oodx ~]$ cat /etc/ood/config/clusters.d/baobab.yaml 
# /etc/ood/config/clusters.d/my_cluster.yml
---
v2:
  metadata:
    title: "Baobab"
  login:
    host: "oodx"
  job:
    adapter: "slurm"
    bin: "/usr/bin"
  batch_connect:
    vnc:
      script_wrapper: "export PATH=$PATH:/opt/TurboVNC/bin\n%s"
      websockify_cmd: '/usr/bin/websockify'

Test the desktop

For easy test, overwrite the bc_desktop configuration:

(baobab)-[root@oodx ~]$ cat /etc/ood/config/apps/bc_desktop/baobab.yml 
---
title: "Baobab Desktop"
cluster: "baobab"
attributes:
  desktop: "xfce"
  bc_queue: "ood-test"
  bc_num_slots: 1

Where bc_queue is the slurm partition. ( in my case I have only one node in this partition)

Maybe you will need to allow users to start vnc-session. With all test I did I do not remember where it is :sweat_smile:

@jeff.ohrstrom, If I am wrong, please correct/complete me. For me it was not clear in the documentation , maybe some more tips can be added in the documentation. For example, I didn’t know that the rpm openondemand-compute existed.

Thank you for all advises