What is My Best Option to Share Screen and Files Between Two Fedora KDE Machines?

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Hey Guys,

I was wondering what my options are to use my desktop from my laptop in the next room. My laptop has relatively limited storage with 512GB NVM storage on board. It’s partitioned with a 120GB for Windows 11 because I know I’ll need Windows for something at some point. The rest is dedicated to Fedora KDE and storage is getting a little low because of the virtual machines I have installed with Virtual Box mostly just to test.

The laptop has 16GB onboard RAM too. It’s a pretty zippy system with an AMD Ryzen 7 processor. 16GB is great for multitasking, etc but once I start running VMs especially more than one the OOM killer usually kicks in and kills my VM(s).

At the same time I have a fairly beefy desktop that hardly gets used. It has 32GB of RAM, two SSDs (256 GB & 1 TB) plus a 1 TB 7200 RPM drive for storage. I’d like to use it to host my VMs and as a file server of sorts. This will free up storage on my laptop and leave my RAM free for multitasking instead of VMs.

My only caveat is I’d like to keep using Virtual Box exclusively. Mainly because I’m used to it but also because I have a gray market W11 Pro license activated in a VM on that machine. Changing hypervisors would trigger reactivation. I do see options to setup VNC directly to Virtual Machines but that sounds like extra steps when VNC into the host would allow me to use the entire computer.

Aside from that I’d like to figure out how to mount the 1 TB HD as a share on my laptop so I can put all my documents and stuff on the desktop then just backup that whole disk to an external drive with Time Shift or whatever, etc. I don’t want my laptop to hang if the desktop isn’t powered on. This way I don’t have to duplicate my documents and not know what copy is updated vs old, etc. I used to run One Drive and Dropbox for file sync so it didn’t really matter but I no longer have those subscriptions.

Would it just be simpler to VNC into the desktop and edit the files physically on that machine vs. sharing the files over the network?

TL;DR:

I want to share screens between two Fedora KDE installs to more powerful desktop for VMs. Also need to utilize the desktop for file storage. Bonus points if I can connect to the desktop easily from my iPad Pro

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The best option for that is an NFS mount. Set up the desktop as an NFS server, and the laptop as an NFS client. Export the filesystem you want to share from the desktop. Do an NFS mount from the laptop. From the laptop it will look like the shared filesystem just another local filesystem.

You can make it all automatic so the NFS mount happens every time you boot the laptop. To do that put the NFS mount in /etc/fstab…. but set it to time out trying if the desktop is not turned on.

To run Vbox in the desktop and see its screen in the laptop is easy…. you forward the X display from the desktop to the laptop. Start Vbox from a terminal in the desktop, but before you start it do `setenv DISPLAY laptopaddress:0`….. all graphics output will appear in a window om the laptop.

That is the low-level way. Someone will probably suggest some app that makes it easy.

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Thanks Neville! NFS sounds like just the ticket. I had no idea about the setenv command. This looks sounds like a fairly simple process. :nerd_face: :man_dancing:

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