My VNC based development environment with Visual Studio Code running on Ubuntu

I've used this setup for my development environment for several years - giving me a developer desktop I can access anywhere. Even from my mobile phone. I've been fixing bugs, writing code and deployed emergency fixes from the bus, train and mountain tops.

The setup is based on a lightweight desktop environment. There are lot of alternatives, but I've chosen fluxbox. From a plain AWS Amazon Ubuntu 16.04 ec2 instance I've started like this:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install fluxbox

Download and extract tigervnc from https://github.com/TigerVNC/tigervnc/releases (I downloaded the binary file from https://bintray.com/tigervnc/stable/tigervnc/1.7.0 named tigervnc-1.7.0.x86_64.tar.gz )

then extract:

tar -xvzf tigervnc-1.7.0.x86_64.tar.gz

You need to install:

sudo apt-get install x11-xkb-utils

You need to edit .vnc/xstartup:

nano .vnc/xstartup

last line replace "twm &" with:

fluxbox &

Then you can start the vnc server:

./tigervnc-1.7.0.x86_64/usr/bin/vncserver

For code editing I'm using Visual Studio Code - which you can download from here https://code.visualstudio.com/Download

Install it by running (replace code.deb with the exact name of your downloaded file):

sudo dpkg -i code.deb

You may have to run (to install dependencies):

sudo apt-get install -f

Also vscode won't run unless you install libxss1 and libasound2:

sudo apt-get install libxss1

sudo apt-get install libasound2

Now you should be able to launch visual studio code by typing:

code

For VNC clients there are a lot of options. On my mobile phone I use Jump remote desktop (works great on both Android and iOS). For desktop there are several alternatives, but I like tightvnc on windows, jump remote desktop on osx, and on Ubuntu I use the built-in alternatives.