I have an idle server in a datacenter and would like to offer a full GNOME desktop to several users over the network. What is the best way to do this? The users are all using Debian/GNOME already.
Philip Hands
[ Editor ]
The thing you’re looking for is probably XDMCP, which you can find out about here:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/XDMCP-HOWTO/index.html
although this will involve the user logging in to the server at their gdm,kdm,xdm,whatever prompt, such that the local machine is simply providing the X-display and all other programs are on the remote system.
As mentioned LTSP provides a nice setup for doing this.
An alternative is to log into the local machine, but also allow some programs to be run on the spare server — xauth should help with that, or ssh’d X forwarding.
You can do this sort of semi-thin client with LTSP too.
Andrew Cater
[ Editor ]
You could look at LTSP – Linux terminal server packages – designed for just this sort of thing for serving sessions for machines in schools, for example.
VNC will work, as would FreeNX (though I have a feeling there’s some non-freeness in FreeNX – free client but no good free server?)
GDM will do it, though by default the setting is disabled in Debian (I think that the —nolisten stops GDM working.) This requires at least port 6000 to be open and, by default, is insecure.
For individual apps / an xterm on a particular machine nothing beats ssh -Y, of course.
Do be aware: you will need network bandwidth and latency may be a problem if the other machnes are not on the same network. It’s very feasible to do – but you may not get the speed of response that people are used to with local machines. Semi-thin clients, where a local hard disk on each client machlne is used for caching will help significantly. The Diskless Linux HOWTOs may also prove helpful here.
Alexander Fernández
[ Editor ]
My best solution was installing XRDP from the repositories, I have Debian 6.0.1a and it works great, just:
# apt-get install xrdp
Reboot the Computer and voila!, you can conect with tsclient and with MSTSC (Yes, the Windows Client for Remote Desktop, it was funny as hell when I tested and worked so well)
Now you have a full service, it allows several users, usable from anywhere, anyhow.
fuck off
[ Editor ]
Check out FreeNX