[LUGSB] Remote KDE

[James Crasta]

There's a few options, and part of it depends on whether you want
multiple users (such as in a terminal server) or just to share a
single user setup.   Also, whether you're doing this on a private LAN,
or over the internet.  I'll go through them briefly in order of
difficulty.

1) I haven't kept up with KDE 3.5+, but KDE 3.1 or so introduced a VNC
server which you enabled through its control pane.   This allowed
desktop sharing much like windows remote desktop on an XP machine, you
got a confirmation message and then your live desktop was shared with
the connecting user.   This was easy to set up, because it was built
in to KDE and just a checkbox to enable.

2) You can SSH tunnel X11 apps.  This gives you limited ability to run
a full desktop, rather you're just running individual apps remotely.
It's not very efficient, but it does work and is secure.   Your SSH
server already has this built-in, you just need to enable it through
/etc/ssh/sshd_config.

3) If you plan on using this on a LAN only, You can enable XDMCP in
your gui login manager such as GDM/KDM.   Then you can log in from any
X11 client supporting XDMCP, with a separate desktop/user as one
logged in locally.   This is just enabling an option in a  config file
(and GDM lets you enable it through its graphical config utility), but
I must emphasize due to the huge bandwidth / perceived latency of X11,
and the complete lack of encryption and near impossibility to tunnel,
it's only really an option for LAN use.

4) You could actually set up a VNC server application (such as realvnc
/ tightvnc) or Nomachine NX.   All these setups require quite a lot
more initial setup, but give you a full remote desktop and multiple
logged in users, whether over LAN or internet.   Also, the VNC and NX
protocols are optimized for slower connections and do things such as
compressing bitmaps, eliminating roundtrips where possible, etc.


I must mention of all the approaches I mentioned, only NX and SSH
tunneling offer any encryption if you plan on remoting from the
internet.   You can tunnel VNC through ssh, however and then it's
pretty safe.


On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 11:22 PM, agent fat <agentfat2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Is it possible to tunnell a KDE session, so I can do a graphical login from
> a seperate machine?
>
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