2 comments
Comment from: Hinermad Visitor
Comment from: jkwarren Member
I’m here to anticipate… :)
I started with Ubuntu because it’s fun to say. Seriously. It’s based on Debian, which I think has a pretty good package manager, and as many sites that have RPM distributions support apt-get, too. Plus Ubuntu can do both. There’s a “multiverse” installation site they have where the bleeding edge updates are submitted by the community at-large, plus everything builds from source, assuming you have gcc and the libraries installed.
As for getting X through your firewall, there are a few two ports you need to open. I’m not sure what they are off the top of my head (6700 for fonts, and 6600 for X itself?) any more since I use SSH tunnelling instead. SSH is nice because it offers encryption and compression, too. All you have to do is open TCP port 22 on your firewall to your SSH server (your favorite or fastest LINUX box), and ensure the SSH server is running and has X forwarding enabled. Your local firewall has to allow traffic through to port 22, or allow the CONNECT method, which will let you use the proxy capabilities of the more current SSH client releases.
Then just connect from another X box (e.g. LINUX or Mac or Solaris…) with something like ssh user@server -X to let it know you want to forward X. Then run your remove X program on your local server from the SSH window, like xterm&, for a cheesy example. There are other ways to launch remote programs through an SSH tunnel, but this is the most straight forward to discuss in one paragraph.
It’s a little trickier if you run Windows locally. Cygwin is your best bet for X serving on Windows. Basically install Cygwin with X and SSH, start it, and repeat as above.
Otherwise VNC is probably the best bet. VNC has some additional upsides, too, like the session persists beyond the connection, allowing interruption of the display without loosing the work, or allowing you to start a long process without sitting there watching it, or even allowing you to “transport” the session to another system, or share the session with other systems. I like VNC a lot, too… There are many flavors of VNC now; I just picked the one closest to the original…I personally use TightVNC.
NX has promise, and free clients, but I think it’s wrapped around more around being a thin client. That is that your remote workstation is “dumb” and does little more than display the screen for what runs on the server. This is great on a LAN, even a slower one (e.g. 10MB), but sometimes broadband and shared access (like company gateways, or your DSL up-link speed) kill the whole thin client thing. X on a thicker client like a local LINUX distro or even cygwin seems to respond better when only remote X applications are run, and not the whole X environment. Your mileage may vary.
If NX offers a “thicker” client and lets you do the SSH tunnel, or you get X through the firewall, then the compression might be a boon. I’ve not tried it, just read about it. PXES is a thin client I have tried, and like, and it offers this thicker client solution on its bootable CD. In fact, it easily lets you open multiple desktops to multiple X serving machines. And it supports Microsoft’s remote desktop protocol (RDP), so you can connect to your XP machine at home, too, if you open the firewall far enough…
The Ubuntu LiveCD works great for this, too. Load the thicker client on your workstation, do the SSH forwarding to your remote server, and then run your remote server’s applications through the tunnel.
Jeff,
I was going to ask you for a recommendation on a more up-to-date Linux distro, but it looks like you’ve anticipated my question.
I’ve been using Slackware off-and-on for years, but it seems that most distributions have changed some things (like where initialization scripts are kept) since Slackware was created. Slack is still being maintained, but it no longer seems to be the most compatible with newer software.
I want to try NX (it’s a data compression and caching layer that makes X run faster over a network, so they say) so I can use the GUI on my home computer from work. I’ve been using VNC because I couldn’t get regular X to penetrate the firewall at home (or maybe it’s the firewall at work). But NX assumes the init scripts are someplace that Slackware doesn’t have. There’s plent of online help for people installing NX on Redhat, Fedora, Suse, Gentoo, and others, but not Slackware.
Looks like Ubuntu might be the place to look. Thanks!
Dave