Remote desktop

[Derek Broughton]

Stew Schneider wrote:

> Oh, man! I hate when my brain freezes and takes my Googling skills with
> it...I am a complete blank. Somebody give me a kick start.
> 
> I did something with a Dapper installation that allowed me to connect to
> the login screen from a Windows box using tightVNC. I could then log
> into my account on the Linux box and do what was needed. At the end of
> the session, I end the session, Kubuntu logs out of KDE and waits at the
> graphic login screen for the next time. In other words, the VNCServer
> survives the X restart.

Not really.  Logging out of KDE (or any desktop) is not an "X restart".  

> Tried it today on another machine, and couldn't 
> reconnect. I don't want to leave an open Kubuntu session running on a
> headless box....how did I do this before? If I remember correctly, it
> had something to do with the init scripts, but I cannot recall what.
> 
> In Googling for an answer, I ran into references to freeNX. Anybody got
> any comments about it?

I love NX.  Freenx is not, I think, in active development.  Since FreeNX
doesn't provide a Windows client, I needed to install the NoMachine
(nonfree) Windows client, and eventually that meant I had to install the
NoMachine NX server, because the current Windows NX client won't connect to
the current FreeNX server.

Anyway, NX clients start their own KDE session.  VNC can do that, iirc, but
what you're doing is "XDMCP" - connecting to X via XDMCP and then getting
the KDM options for login.  It's a while since I did XDMCP, but there's a
number of options in /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc related to XDMCP.
-- 
derek