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Running Remote Applications

Issue 190

From Issue #190
February 2010

Feb 01, 2010  By Michael J. Hammel
 in
Displaying remote applications on a local system or even controlling a remote desktop requires little configuration and almost no changes to your everyday application use.

X11Forwarding Pros and Cons

Pros:

  • Very secure—as secure as SSH.

  • Simple to configure.

  • Simple to use.

  • Works with port forwarding.

  • Does not require remote GDM or X server to be running.

  • Safest way to display remote app on other side of firewall to the local display.

  • Multiple applications with a single connection.

  • Can work with video.

Cons:

  • Potentially very slow compared to VNC and GDM.

  • Audio doesn't work.

  • X11 protocol is a bandwidth hog.

Virtual Network Computing (VNC)

XDMCP is the old-school method, and SSH is the safe method. But, the method best integrated into the desktop is Virtual Network Computing (VNC). VNC is a system based on the Remote Frame Buffer protocol from Olivetti Research Labs, which is available for anyone to implement. This protocol isn't based on X11, but lives at a lower level in the Infrastructure layer. This means VNC software can work with any desktop system, including Linux, Windows and Mac OS/X. With VNC, you can display remote Linux desktops next to remote Mac desktops on your local display.

VNC is essentially a protocol definition—it describes how something should work. There are numerous implementations available for Linux systems. Clients are referred to as viewer applications. One open-source implementation is TigerVNC, a fork of the popular TightVNC implementation. TigerVNC offers both server and client viewers and was created to help increase development activity on the project.

GNOME users will find Vino as the default VNC server and Vinagre as the most full-featured client viewer, and they are tightly integrated with the desktop, meaning GNOME provides menu options to configure and enable both the client (Vinagre) and server (Vino).

VNC Configuration

Unlike XDMCP/GDM and SSH, VNC is not used to launch remote applications for display on the local system. Instead, it is used to view and/or grab control of the remote desktop. Thus, the remote desktop must already be running. Additionally, VNC would not be useful if the remote system were running in headless mode, although Xvnc can remove this restriction also. Xvnc provides a remote “virtual” X server to which VNC clients can connect. Because the remote desktop is virtual, Xvnc also can be used to enable an alternate remote desktop and/or multiple remote desktops, perhaps of different sizes.

The VNC server must be enabled on the remote system for the client viewer to connect to it. The server is configured from GNOME using the System→Preferences→Remote Desktop menu option. The configuration dialog requires enabling desktop sharing, configuring security constraints and setting methods of notification (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Vino Configuration under GNOME

Sharing refers to how the desktop will be accessed. Sharing is enabled by allowing remote users to view the desktop and, if desired, allowing them to take control of the desktop. In the latter case, the user of the desktop where the server is enabled will no longer be able to use the desktop while the remote user controls it. For administration of systems on your local network at home, the server should be configured to allow other users to control the desktop.

Under Security, the only option required for home use is specifying a password. This password is not encrypted for Vino or TigerVNC, so this protection is not very helpful outside of a local network protected by a firewall. If the option to confirm each connection is set, every time you use a VNC client viewer to connect to that machine, you also must walk over to that machine to allow the connection. For home use, this option should not be set.

Notifications are a personal preference. Because the idea of VNC, at least for our purposes here, is that the server is on a machine you don't want to be in front of, the notifications are of little use. However, it is helpful to have an icon displayed when a connection is active, in case you forget when one machine is controlling the one you're trying to use.

On the client side, the GNOME Vinagre VNC client viewer is started from Applications→Internet→Remote Desktop Viewer. The Vinagre client looks like any other desktop application (Figure 4), with a menu bar and an obvious Quit option (File→Quit). This is in contrast to, for example, Xephyr for displaying a remote desktop. Vinagre also allows opening connections to multiple remote servers with each remote desktop connection accessed by a tabbed folder (Figure 5). This makes using VNC very convenient and easy to understand, as it uses the usual desktop application widget paradigms.

Figure 4. Vinagre Login to Remote Server

Figure 5. Vinagre Remote Desktop Display

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NX server

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/08/2010 - 12:22.

On the site of the Dutch MandrivaClub (www.mandrivaclub.nl) I also read very positive reviews about FreeNX. Much faster than vnc.

Dana, you are right. NX shouldn't be ignored.

Arvi Pingus

NX server

dwellen's picture
Submitted by dwellen on Wed, 01/06/2010 - 18:29.

Having tried most of these methods I stumbled on NX by NoMachines. It does have some advantages over most remote desktop in that it has very good performance, if fact some applications that normally, due to poor performance are usable over a WAN or VPN. I know it's closed source but the company has released much of their code to the open source project called freeNX. I have done about 6 months of testing along with user testing/feedback and have had great success using NX. It also handles multimedia content (Haven't tried but it claims to) and using ssh along with compression so you get the advantages of secure ssh along with almost native performance.

Thanks,
Dana Wellen

BTW, I don't work for or have any connection to NoMachines but NX seams to get ignored often.

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