Linux remote desktop insanity.
December 24, 2009 10:29 AM   Subscribe

Happy late December holidays! I have been fighting with this issue for what seems like forever. The crux: how can I get my Fedora box to "serve" desktops and applications to other machines, without the VNC hack?

What I mean is, I've got a bare bones machine sitting in a closet acting as a file server. For the most part, I can do what I need to do via the command line and putty. But I'd like to have it be available to act as a terminal server, in the same manner as Windows Terminal Server or Citrix.

What I don't want to do is leave a GUI console running all the time and just VNC into is as neccessary. First, because that seems wasteful. Second, because this machine has limited hardware and doing it that way is less than optimal performance wise.

I have barely managed to get a connection to it using putty x11 forwarding and Xming. It is a pain to get running, as I have to log into putty and then have it fire off the gnome session and also start the Xming program on my desktop. Worse, it only works for a couple of minutes and then freezes.

I know there is LTSP, but I can't seem to figure it out, and figure out whether it would work the way I want it to. It seems specifically geared to dedicated thin clients- the setup seems to depend on the thin client being linux based.

I know what I ask is possible, because I've seen it. And because the whole concept of Xwindows is that it is network aware.

Alls I want is to be able to double click an icon on my Windows desktop, and have a window pop open where I get the GUI login manager and can log into a session on Fedora. I don't care about sound or printers or anything fancy like that.

(I have spent countless weekends searching through documentation, but like most things Linux, it is sort of a choose-your-own-adventure chicken and egg problem.)
posted by gjc to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)
 
You probably want NX. Either the free as in beer version shipped by nomachine, or the free as in speech versions named FreeNX and NeatX.

You can also do this with XMDCP, which is natively supported by Fedora through the GDM login manager. This allows a remote X windows (like the one included in cygwin) to connect and operate as a thin client.

FreeNX + the NoMachine NX client is likely to be the easiest setup.
posted by toxic at 11:06 AM on December 24, 2009 [1 favorite]


You mention Putty so I presume you are using microsoft windows.

What I do for this situation is run ssh -X and then run individual graphic applications from that connection (ie. run "rox&" to browse files graphically or "emacs&" to edit files or "lastfm&" to play music on the other machine's speakers). The app shows up in a normal window on my X display. This is pretty much the way X was designed to work ever since the 1980s.

You mention putty, so I guess you would need a Windows X server to be running. There are a few availible, if the xming server is causing problems you could try the cygwin server, or one of the many others.

I think gnome is the main source of your problem. Gnome is really heavy-weight, especially for remote usage (ie. high ram and CPU needs, and high bandwidth needs as a remote X app) and that could be much of the problem - if you can manage to use your system without running gnome I guarantee you that remote usage will be much easier, if you absolutely must run a full remote desktop. You could try running xfce if you need bells and whistles, or blackbox or evilwm for a better performing and more stripped down setup. You can run "rox -P" along with any WM to get the shortcut icons on the desktop thing with low resource usage if you are attached to that. Also, if gnome is absolutely necessary, at the very least turn off all "desktop effects" and animations - they are going to destroy usability over a remote connection unless you have extremely low ping times and high bandwidth.

I have had much better luck with running individual apps on a remote display, rather than a whole desktop, and I highly recommend that approach.

posted by idiopath at 5:25 AM on December 25, 2009


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