no nonsense noVNC

vnc.sh

#!/bin/bash
#added kill function
#run as:
#./SCRIPTNAME.sh k
#to kill these spawned processes 
#
#if you want to to be able to position your windows interactively:
#sudo apt-get -y install blackbox
#add this to the end of runvnc()
#blackbox -display :1 >/dev/null &>/devnull &
#or
#sudo apt-get install -y flwm
#DISPLAY=:1 flwm
function runvnc() {
    function check_this() {
      this=$1
      if ! [ -x "$(command -v $this)" ]; then
        echo 'Error: '$this' needs to be installed.' >&2
        install="$install $this"
      fi
    }

    install=""

    check_this xterm
    check_this x11vnc
    check_this git
    if ! [ -x "$(command -v pip)" ]; then
      echo 'Error: pip needs to be installed.' >&2
      install="$install python-pip"
    fi
    if ! [ -x "$(command -v Xvfb)" ]; then
      echo 'Error: xvfb needs to be installed.' >&2
      install="$install xvfb"
    fi
    if [ $( python -c 'import pkgutil; print(1 if pkgutil.find_loader("numpy") else 0)' ) ]
    then
       echo 'you have numpy installed, good.' >&2
    else
      echo 'Error: numpy needs to be installed.' >&2
      install="$install python-numpy"
    fi


    if [ -z "$install" ] #if the string is empty
    then
      echo "dependencies met"
    else
      sudo apt-get -y install $install #get the goods
    fi

    if ! [ -x "$(command -v websockify)" ]; then
      echo 'Error: websockify needs to be installed.' >&2
      sudo pip install websockify
    fi


    cd ~
    if [ ! -d "noVNC" ] #if directory doesn't exist
    then
      git clone https://github.com/novnc/noVNC.git
    fi
    if [ -d "noVNC/utils/websockify" ] #packaged version novnc ships has issues
    then
      rm -R  noVNC/utils/websockify/
    fi

    nohup Xvfb :1 -screen 0 800x600x16 +extension RANDR >/dev/null 2>&1 &
    sleep 1
    nohup x11vnc -forever -display :1 >/dev/null 2>&1 & #add -shared if you want more than 1 user at a time
    sleep 1
    nohup bash ~/noVNC/utils/launch.sh --vnc localhost:5900  >/dev/null 2>&1 & #add --listen PORT if you want to serve on another port
    sleep 1
    DISPLAY=:1 xterm +sb -bg black -fg white -geometry 132x46 &  #some nice settings for 800x600
    #you can change the line above to whatever x11 program you want, prepend DISPLAY=:1 to it and you're good to go
    echo "------------------"
    echo "please go to this webpage: "
    echo $( hostname -I | sed -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//' )":6080/vnc.html"
    echo "------------------"
    exit 1
}

function killer() {
    echo "killing all vnc stuff"
    kill $( pidof x11vnc ) 2&> /dev/null
    kill $( pidof Xvfb ) 2&> /dev/null
    kill $( pidof xterm ) 2&> /dev/null
    killall websockify 2&> /dev/null
    kill -9 `ps aux | grep 'basename "$0"' | awk '{print $2}'` 2&> /dev/null
    exit 1
}

case "$1" in
    k) killer
    ;;
    *) runvnc
    ;;
esac

looks legit, maybe wrap the repeated if blocks into something like:

function check_this() {
  this=$1
  if ! [ -x "$(command -v $this)" ]; then
    echo 'Error: $this needs to be installed.' >&2
    install="$install $this"
  fi    
}

Then you can do:

check_this xvfb
check_this git
check_this ...

Also I always learn a bit from checking my bash scripts with this:

https://www.shellcheck.net/

also it can be a thing to explicitly exit 1 with a non zero exit code to signify some sort of error.

why the extra screen space buffer?

Thanks for the advice! I took screen out, using nohup now, and cloned a VM a few times to test that everything works out of the box in debian. Couldn't use the check_this() on all packages idea because pip is 'python-pip' and Xvfb is 'xvfb'. Had to check is the noVNC package of websockify was in the noVNC/utils directory, this causes some problems. Restructured the python numpy check so it doesn't complain.

Added kill functionality. Xterm still spits an error, but it works.

On Armbian, I had to...
sudo apt-get install xfonts-base
reboot
but then all was good. Run's without errors what so ever. And error in image above was from...
sh vnc.sh instead of bash vnc.sh, forums say sumin with the crunchbang on line one but #! is there, so maybe another Armbian thing? W/e it works.