OSN-desktop for use on Binder / JupyterHub

Uses jupyter-remote-desktop-proxy to work.

How to use this repo

Install the applications you want

Install the applications you want. There are three main ways to do this:

From apt via apt.txt

Many common Linux GUI applications are available to be installed from the Ubuntu Apt Repositories. Adding their name to apt.txt file is usually enough to get them installed. Note that by default right now, the base image used by Binder and repo2docker is using Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic, which can be a bit outdated.

From conda via environment.yml

A lot of scientific GUI applications are also packaged via [conda-forge] and can be installed by editing the environment.yml file to include them. For example, qgis is a popular Geospatial GUI application, and is available on conda-forge. You can install it by adding qgis under dependencies in environment.yml.

Manually, with a postBuild script

Sometimes the application you want is not available in apt or conda-forge, or at least not the version you want. You've to manually install them by writing a script in postBuild file to download the app manually (wia wget maybe) and extract the executable application somewhere. You don't have root access here, so some of the things you need to do might be limited. Consider writing your own Dockerfile instead.

Spack and EasyBuild are very useful here but require some work and patience to setup.

Setup a desktop shortcut for GUI apps

When the repo is launched on Binder / desktop is used on JupyterHub, a shortcut that users can click to launch your app is pretty nice. This template contains sample app.desktop file you can use to setup this shortcut. Our start script will automatically make sure that any .desktop files (which is how most Linux desktops indicate a shortcut file) are put on the user Desktop.

1. Rename the file from app.desktop to <your-app-name>.desktop
2. Open the file, and fill in values for Name, Exec and optionally Icon
3. Commit the file