Remote connections

You know the drill! You need to fix a thing at work, a 5 minute thing, but you box was never setup to handle remote connections properly. So fix it, you know you'll need it in two shakes of a lambs tale!

There's a couple of possibilities,  VNC (slower than smoking death!) ssh, and some that run on the remote desktop protocol like XRDP.

Putty & XMing

If you're a Winer, you'll need putty for ssh'ing and a X server, i use XMing. And you'll need to prepare your box if you run Linuxmint Desktop edition.

# sudo aptitude install openssh-server

Then you'll have to allow your remote machine to connect to your box:

# sudo emacs /etc/ssh/sshd_config 

Remove the # comment sign from: ForwardX11 no. Then change no to yes so it looks like this:









ForwardX11 yes


Save and exit. Next you'll have to add you remote machine name to the xhost by:


#xhost +<your ip or machine.domain>

Next you'll have to check that the .Xauthority file in your home folder is owned by your user (mine wasent?) 

# ls -l ~/.Xauthority




-rw------- 1 user user 181 Mar 25 13:35 .Xauthority


If not you should chown it ro your user:

# sudo chown user ~/.Xauthority

You'll now be able to remote connect to your box from any machine with a running x server. Simply start the XServer on your client machine, login via ssh and run the program. In putty you'll have to forward X11 packages, there's a setting called just that.

VNC 

 To use VNC you'll have to install a VNC server on your box, i.e or X11vnc

# sudo aptitude install tightvncserver 

or

# sudo aptitude install x11vnc

The difference is that tightvncserver will serve a new session. x11vnc will allow access to an existing session. That may be what you'll need if you have a running session on your work box.  If you use x11vnc you might want to set a password.

XRDP

Install XRDP and run the deamon.

#sudo aptitude install xrdp

You connect to it by using the Windows remote desktop connection utility. You'll get a new screen, so this utility can't steal your current x session.