FreeNX

[yawningdog]

Do you ever wish there was a better remote desktop for linux? Remote X11 sessions are hard to set up and choppy. VNC is easy to set up and versatile, but still pretty choppy. XRDP is cool and runs smooth if you can get it to work, but piping a VNC connection into an RDP service is kind of complicated. (At least it was for me, and I've only been able to do it once.) SSH is great and I'm comfy with a CLI, but sometimes I just want my desktop darnit!

I've found the solution, and it's called FreeNX. It channels an X session over an ssh connection but uses compression and caching to improve speed and smoothness to rival protocols like RDP and ICA. And setup in Ubuntu Lucid was just a matter of cutting and pasting 8 CLI commands, no editing was needed. (apt-get update, install, wget a setup script, unzip it and run it.) Installing the Windows client was as easy as downloading the .exe and running the one-time wizard.

As far as I'm concerned, VNC as a remote desktop solution just became obsolete. FreeNX ROCKS!

[Paul Komski]

Thanks - any good stuff like this is worth knowing about.

I know its not the same thing but TeamViewer (http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/index.aspx) for Linux is very easy to set up on client computers.

[yawningdog]

I've used TeamViewer and I'm a big fan, but only because it allows me to do remote desktop support for free. It's like VNC, except getting the remote client installed is web-automated. I'll still use TeamViewer whenever I want to do remote support, but it will not be my Linux remote desktop as long as FreeNX is around.