Remote X11 Connection

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Aug 4 19:25:56 UTC 2007


Chris Jones wrote:
> On Saturday 4 August 2007 7:28:29 pm Konstantin Svist wrote:
>> Chris Jones wrote:
>>> Logging on via ssh does not start a full session
>> Somewhat off topic: is there a way to start a full session remotely?
> 
> Yes, several ways ...
> 
> Firstly, at the login window, under the menu you should see an option for 
> remote login (at least on my Fedora7 box here, installed from the KDE live CD 
> thats the case. On the standard Fedora7 install, or a different distro it 
> might be label different or missing).
> 
> If you do have this you can type in the IP address of the remote session and 
> attempt to login. Note this will only work in the sysadmin at the remote site 
> have configured things to allow this sort of a connection (xdm I think, not 
> sure). In any case I wouldn't want to use it over anything other than a fast 
> (100Mb plus) local network.
> 
> Other ways include starting a VNC session on the remote service, and 
> connecting to that via vncviewer. Another would be to use the freenx system. 
> Googling for either of these should bring up loadds of info.
> 
> A real low level way would be to start a empty X server on your local machine, 
> then login into the remote site via SSH, through the console for instance, 
> export the display back to the new empty Xserver and run 'startkde' or 
> whatever to fireup your remote session on your local X server. Again, only 
> try this on a fast network.

On a local LAN, if you have gdm configured to accept remote sessions, 
you can bring up another system in runlevel 3 so X doesn't start 
automatically, then start it with "X -query remote_host" and you'll get 
a GUI login prompt followed by the remote desktop.  This also works with 
the Cygwin Windows version with "Xwin -query remote_host".  If you want 
to run a remote desktop in an already running X session, use "Xnest 
-query remote_host".  However, for remote access over lower bandwidth 
connections and often even locally there are advantages to using freenx 
on the server and the cross-platform NX clients from 
http://www.nomachine.com.  Among other things it will let you disconnect 
a running session and reconnect later, perhaps from a different 
location, with everything still running.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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