Remote XWindow session

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 06:27:52PM -0700, Rajinder Yadav wrote:
> Is it possible to set up a remote xwindow session? What I want to do is
> connect to a remote Linux box that has no video card, but I still want 
> to be able to run a local KDE session controlling the remote Linux box 
> in a rich GUI environment.
> 
> Is this possible, and is this easy to setup?

Well you can run xdm/gdm/kdm/wdm on the box, and run an X server in
remote session mode to connect to it.  I used to do that a long time ago.

Something like:

X -query headlessbox

You can even set it up on your box with the video card so that vt7 is
local and vt8 runs the remote session.  Look in Xservers if you run xdm,
and in whatever gdm/kdm/wdm uses if you run one of those.

Or for a dirty hack add this to your /etc/inittab:
X1:23:respawn:/usr/bin/X -query remotehost vt8

Other interesting methods involve Xnest, which runs an X server in a
window, so you could be locally doing:

Xnest -geometry 1024x768 -query remotehost

That would make a window 1024x768 with a session running on the remote
host's *dm.

In every case you have to configure the *dm on the remote box to allow
remote connections, and of course disable the attempt to run a local one
(which is the default for all of them), since you don't actually have
a video card to run it on there I guess.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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