[OOD-users] Fixing NoVNC screen resolution

[Eric Appelt]

Hi Everyone,

We are getting close to finishing our evaluation phase of OOD with 
select labs and deployment of the service at Vanderbilt's ACCRE facility 
for general use.

One of our clients uses MATLAB and has noticed two issues related to 
automatic screen sizing through NoVNC. This causes issues when the user 
closes NoVNC on their desktop and opens it again on their laptop. The 
remote desktop screen is resized causing MATLAB to panic and throw a 
cascade of java exceptions.

Another related issue is that when a session is initialized on the 
smaller laptop screen, the remote desktop size is too small for some of 
their MATLAB applications and the font is unreadable. What they need is 
a remote screen larger than the actual browser window that they can 
"Clip to Window" in NoVNC and pan around.

For both these problems I was hoping I could create an interactive 
desktop form where the user could specify a desired screen size in 
pixels using "bc_vnc_resolution". However, I can't seem to get the form 
attribute to show up, nor does XFCE seem to respect this setting as 
NoVNC will default to remote resizing and rescale a window. My yml form 
is as follows:

---
title: "ACCRE Fixed-Screen Desktop"
cluster: "accre"
attributes:
   desktop: "xfce"
   bc_account: null
   bc_queue: null
   bc_num_slots: null
   bc_mem:
     label: "Maximum Memory (GB)"
     value: 4
   bc_num_cores:
     label: "Number of CPU Cores"
     value: 1
   bc_vnc_resolution:
     required: true
     widget: "resolution_field"
     label: "Desktop Screen Resolution (px)"
     value: "1024x768"
form:
   - bc_vnc_idle
   - desktop
   - bc_num_hours
   - bc_mem
   - bc_num_cores
   - bc_num_slots
   - node_type
   - bc_account
   - bc_queue
   - bc_vnc_resolution
   - bc_email_on_started
submit: "submit/my_submit.yml.erb"

I tried variations of the attribute settings but nothing ever shows up. 
Is there something I am doing wrong here? I couldn't find any 
documentation on this option or reference browsing the source.

Thanks,

Eric