Short Tip: Sharing a Gnome Terminal on XWayland in a Jitsi Session
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At credativ, we prefer open and self-hosted technologies to proprietary solutions and walled gardens. That’s why we use Jitsi-Meet for internal meetings and video-conferences with customers. It works quite well (except in overly restrictive corporate networks), but screen and application sharing under current Linux distributions running Wayland/XWayland (e.g. Debian bullseye) is a challenge.
Screen and Gnome application sharing works on recent Firefox (91.6 ESR was current when this blog post was written), but one might prefer to run Jitsi-Meet under chromium, which (as of version 98) cannot share the desktop out of the box. Under chromium, only legacy X11 apps like xterm work, which might or might not be an option. For those not having run xterm in a while, the ctrl-right-click combination in xterm will pop up a context menu that lets one change the font size and the context menu on ctrl-left-click has a “Secure Keyboard” option that makes the xterm switch to reverse video (light background).
However, xterm does not have tabs and maybe one wants to present an already running gnome-terminal. In order to run gnome-terminal in a way that it can be shared by Jitsi-Meet, a separate gnome-terminal-server needs to be started in a X11 context, then a gnome-terminal can attach to it:
(GDK_BACKEND=x11 /usr/libexec/gnome-terminal-server --app-id jitsi-meet.Terminal & \ sleep 1 && GDK_BACKEND=x11 gnome-terminal --app-id jitsi-meet.Terminal)
If your XWayland is running on another display than the default :0, you might have to add DISPLAY=:1 or so everywhere as well. Other Gnome applications (like evince in order to present PDFs) are somewhat easier to start, just prepend them with GDK_BACKEND=x11:
GDK_BACKEND=x11 evince presentation.pdf
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About the author
Michael Banck
about the person
Michael Banck has been an employee of credativ GmbH since 2009, a member of the Debian project since 2001, and is also active in other open source projects. As a member of credativ's database team, he has supported and advised various customers in recent years on solving problems with and the daily operation of PostgreSQL®, as well as on the introduction of high-availability solutions in the area of databases.