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I am trying to run X on an unrooted Moto Z Play. For that I installed GNURoot which is running a limited version of Debian. One of the limits is that I can't access /dev. This causes startx and also xinit to fail, because it can't access /dev/tty*. Is there any way to start X without that access? On my old (rooted) phone, I was running Linux Deploy, which shared its desktop via VNC. Is anything similar possible without root and with the SELinux limitations in place?

Edit: I don't want X to access the phone's display hardware, I only want it to be available via VNC so I can access it via a VNC app pointed to localhost.

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  • How exactly do you plan to let the X server access the display hardware if it doesn't have permissions to do so? If anyone could just bypass root permission restrictions, they wouldn't be restrictions. You can run a second X server that allows remote clients via VNC etc., but that one will also not be able to access the display hardware directly. Though you can run a client for it on your primary X server, of course. – dirkt Jul 24 '17 at 8:12
  • I don't actually want it to access the display hardware directly, I just want to be able to access it using VNC. That's the way I had it setup on Linux Deploy. To view the display I'd just connect to localhost with a VNC app. – Dakkaron Jul 24 '17 at 10:07
  • And to be able to access the hardware display in any way, via VNC or otherwise, you need root. Because if you want to run an X server that you can access via VNC, that X server in turn needs to access the display, if you want that. That you are not directly involved in the this when you use VNC doesn't change this fact. – dirkt Jul 24 '17 at 14:28
  • Is there any way to do that without a hardware display? So just with some kind of virtual display? – Dakkaron Jul 25 '17 at 7:01
  • @Dakkaron Xvfb provides an invisible X server that can be accessed with VNC or ssh. As it has a virtual display only, it does not need hardware access. – mviereck Aug 1 '17 at 16:18
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Contrary to the comments this is actually possible using xvnc or more precisely xtightvncserver. This starts a new X server without using /dev and forwards that to vnc.

The exact command is tightvncserver -geometry 1920x1080 :51.

To start a program (in this case the LXDE desktop environment) that is to be displayed on that virtual display use this command: DISPLAY=localhost:51 lxsession -s LXDE &

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  • That's actually noy "contrary to the comments" (if you mean mine): "You can run a second X server that allows remote clients via VNC etc". – dirkt Aug 8 '17 at 8:08

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