This Github repository contains resources for building Docker image to run Sci2 and Gephi on a Ubuntu operating system, via virtual network connection (VNC). The Docker container let users run these software locally without having to install software on their systems.
The associated image is already available on Docker Hub and can directly be run using docker run command. The details for running the Docker command are provided in the Running Sci2 container in background.
The Docker image contains the following components:
- light-weight desktop environment
- Sci2 and Gephi applications accessible through Desktop links
- popular text editor vim
- lite but advanced graphical editor mousepad
Docker is required for running the container. Steps to install and get Docker running on Windows systems are available here. For Mac users, they are available here.
Once Docker is running, open terminal and execute the following command.
docker run -d -p 6901:6901 -v ~/Downloads:/home/headless/Dropbox -t cnsiu/sci2-vnc
The command will download the container image from Docker's image repository, and run the container in background. It also run an HTML5 client on TCP port 6901 and exposes it to be accessed by a browser on the host system. In addition, it mounts ~/Downloads directory in the host system to a volume (also visible as a directory) /home/headless/Dropbox in the container OS. Mounting basically creates a bridge between the host's file system and the container's file system, so the files in ~/Downloads are accessible via volume /home/headless/Dropbox in the container. You can change these mapped directories to other locations in the command to suit your needs.
You can see all the containers running in background using docker ps command.
To be able to use the container over VNC, any modern web browser needs to be used. Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Microsoft Edge are supported browsers.
Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:6901/vnc.html?password=headless and click on Connect button to access the container's desktop environment. If you are not using your local system, specify NAS path of the host system instead of localhost.
Click the slider visible nearby Gephi icon in the above image. noNVC configuration options should be accessible now. Click on Settings and change the Scaling mode: to Remote Resizing. This will maximize the GUI window to fill up all the space in the browser window. There is also a button to toggle FullScreen mode.
Execute docker ps to list all the running containers. Stop the container with docker stop command using the first 4 characters of the CONTAINER_ID associated with image cnsiu/sci2-vnc as shown in the image below.
Dockerfile used for building Sci2 image has been adapted from accetto's Dockerfile for building a base image with VNC server. Thanks to accetto for making his code available to public!