Many Ways to Use Remote Desktop (X11VNC)

There are many ways to get into a computer by using remote desktop. Some examples include: ssh, VNC, RDP, XDMCP, ICA, X11VNC, etc.

Remote desktop can be used for lots of different reasons, such as if you promised your son to get him a game in your house and you have to go to work, VNC can come to the rescue!. Or, if you need help with configuring something on your system and know a trusted person that can assist you remotely, X11VNC is the tool to help.

Today, I'm going to talk about X11VNC. X11VNC is the most commonly used remote desktop tool for X systems. To start X11VNC, you need to first install it. To get X11VNC, type this command in a terminal of a Debian- or Ubuntu-based:

 sudo apt-get install x11vnc

To start it up, just for a test, type
```
x11vnc
```
and you might see something that catches your attention. You're using X11VNC without a password. Press Ctrl + C.
Time to setup a password. Type
```
x11vnc -storepasswd
```
Enter a password.
X11VNC will ask you to save your password into a place like /home/<YOUR LOGIN NAME>/.vnc/passwd. It will ask you to confirm. Press y.
To start X11VNC with a password, get ready to type 32 letters or more if your name is large. Type
```
x11vnc -rfbauth /home/<YOUR LOGIN NAME>/.vnc/passwd
```
and there you have it!

Note your host and port. Since the server setup is complete, let's move on to client. You should have two accounts for this step.

Login to the other account without closing the terminal or logging off that account.
Open a terminal and type
```
vncviewer <THE HOST NAME>:<THE PORT>.
```

You're done, remote desktop is set up.

Aaron

Hello. I'm basically a good trusty and helpful Linux user and a good asshole towards Windows. I like South Park and Simpson and other adult comedy animation shows that are on TV these days. I live in hell (India) and if you believe that hell is underground. Oh you're wrong, hell is near the equator in Asia! Other than that I know a lot about Linux and looking foward to learning hacking and image editing.

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NX uses less bandwidth and is faster on most network connections
written by Bill Stewart, October 26, 2009

Hi, good article. Just a note that there is another protocol which you don't mention called NX which we have found is the best for wide area Linux desktop virtualization, provided by the following:

* http://freenx.berlios.de/
* http://code.google.com/p/neatx/
* http://nomachine.com/

NX provides X compression, and so is very bandwidth efficient, and as a consequence is blindingly fast even on bad network connections. We have found it much better than VNC.

At http://Eseri.net/ use NX to host a full company-in-a-box integrated from the best of open source, accessible wide area on a virtual Ubuntu desktop, and so far it works with near-local similar performance from our Montreal data-center to anywhere we've tried it across North America.

Fyi we also support http://FreeOpenSourceSoftware.org/ and have a FOSS give back model, so are trying to provide a bit of a closed loop.

Cheers,
Bill Stewart
Eseri CEO

Using freeNX
written by Martin, October 27, 2009

Hello...freeNX is the ultimate alternative!, i needed aomething like RDP in Ubuntu/Linux and i found this precious piece of software, really reccomend it!.

Ubuntu Howto: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FreeNX

...
written by rich b, October 27, 2009

I enthusiastically agree that (free)NX is the best solution out there. It's good enough for double redirection: I use freeNX to access my home Linux box from work and from there I use RDP to control my Windows XP PC. smilies/shocked.gif