How to run a GUI application on docker

Archive Windows Server 2016
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I am thinking that enabling GUIs inside of Windows Containers will eventually allow to run Windows 10 images. This will eventually allow us to run VDI containers instead of full VDI images. I see a great potential here and take the containers from exclusive use in the data center to every user.

23

I think this guy did it:

I’ll try it tomorrow.

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According to blog article it’s broken 1709 and up

25

Hi there,
did you try to RDP to container? I can enter user id and password but nothing appear after login. I didn’t get any error even. No UI appears . I followed the below artical

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This is very nice article for GUI apps on docker

Is It Time to Dockerize Your GUI Applications?

https://containerjournal.com/2016/10/21/time-dockerize-gui-applications/

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I’m looking forward to Windows apps being available with GUI; I think it’ll be really useful in my job. I look forward to testing the Linux code too, thanks! :slight_smile:

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Is it possible to run GUI test on windowsservercore-1809? sorry I am new to docker and trying to make this work

30

core is just cli.How can you run GUI in core?

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Which one should I use if I want to run GUI in headless mode?

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So, I see that this thread is still getting some traction, and I am not sure I have seen a solution laid down yet.

To answer the question “Why?” I/we have a GUI app that we can run headless with an API and a zeromq implemented protobuf service. It runs fine in 2016, and 2019 servers.

So, now the challenge is to run this in a server core container ltsc2019, and to date, it appears the only dlls that are missing are the opengl32, glu32, vcruntime140.

I have installed vcredist_x64 successfully, but that doesn’t contain those dlls.

I have tried copying the missing dlls over and running regsrv32 on them, but there may be an order to doing that that I haven’t figured out yet.

So, hopefully this answers the question, “Why would you want to fun a GUI app in a container?”, and since I am still trying to do that, what have I missed in this discussion thread that I can still try?

33

Made it work with this guy, using a bridge to connect btw the container and the computer X system.
Hope it helps :wink:

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34

I used a similar way to run firefox in WSL 2 to access containers using their local IP addresses. :slight_smile: So it looks good.

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35

Hey, i’am just wondering did you had some performance problem when running the GUI app with this method ?

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Yes, I had. Sometimes firefox did not update webpages. I had to restart firefox to show the new content. But this was in WSL 2 and not ins container.

Long ago I tried some GUI app in a container but the GUI was not perfect. Some menu items did not work, but I don’t remember how I ran the container then.

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37

Hmm
 okey thank you, i tried with another method using VNC viewer and it seems that app performance are much higher doing it with it.