Remote Desktop on Linux (Ubuntu specifically)

electricitylikesme

So I'm trying to build a decent Linux machine to use around my lab. One thing I'd really really like is a nice way to switch between using it locally and using it remotely, as we get in Windows with Remote Desktop.

Essentially I want to be able to VNC in to the machine and login via gdm but without the keyboard/mouse/display being active on the actual physical machine (instead I'd like it to sit at a gdm prompt so if I then transfer to using the machine directly I can just log in back to my original session).

The trouble is as far as I can tell this can't actually be done. Am I wrong or is Windows actually capable of doing something Linux isn't?

Zilla360

You can do all this using just X:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System#Design

between server and client operates network-transparently: the client and server may run on the same machine or on different ones, possibly with different architectures and operating systems, but they run the same in either case. A client and server can even communicate securely over the Internet by tunneling the connection over an encrypted network session.

An X client itself may contain an X server having display of multiple clients. This is known as "X nesting". Open-source clients such as Xnest and Xephyr support such X nesting.

To use a client program on a remote machine, the user does the following:

* On the local machine, open a terminal window
* use telnet or ssh to connect to the remote machine
* request local display/input service ( export DISPLAY=[user's machine]:0 )

The remote X client will then make a connection to the user's local X server, providing display and input to the user.

Alternatively, the local machine may run a small program that connects to the remote machine and starts the client application.

Practical examples of remote clients include:

* administering a remote machine graphically
* running a computationally intensive simulation on a remote Unix machine and displaying the results on a local Windows desktop machine
* running graphical software on several machines at once, controlled by a single display, keyboard and mouse.

exoplasm

Look into FreeNX or NoMachine NX Free Edition. I think this will do what you need. It's the closest thing to Remote Desktop on 'nix. Beats the hell out of VNC (in my experience).

zeeny

Ditto. NoMachine's NX is what you're looking for.