It's taken a while but believe it or not I finally know enough about Linux to actually help other Linux users with a limited number of topics <pause for all the laughter and guffaws to subside>

The area in which I have developed a measure of competency, a certain savoir faire you might say, in spite of my general lack of talent and motivation is running BOINC on Linux. The biggest problem I run into when trying to help BOINCers attempting to BOINC on Linux is that they often don't know spit about Linux but since they are well intentioned, kind hearted folk (they wouldn't be running BOINC if they were not) so I try to help. Often they have assembled a machine out of new/used/spare parts for the sole purpose or donating all that machine's resources to the research community via this distributed computing network called BOINC. Therefore they try to reduce their costs by installing Linux as opposed to Windows. But they don't really know Linux well enough to pull that off.

Sometimes all they need is a few hints and they're off and running on their own. Other times the problem is more complicated or they are one of the few people who are unfortunate enough to be even thicker than me. Sometimes there is a language barrier. Lately I've been trying to keep it simple by just giving them a series of commands to run in a terminal rather than explaining why they need to do what they need to do. Sometimes it's more important to just get them up and running so they stay interested and worry about teaching them the finer points later. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. I need another type of arrow in my quiver of "help methods".

If they're running BOINC they have an Internet connection. What I have in mind is setting things up so that I can log into their machine, fix whatever is wrong and log out. 99% of the time a terminal would be all I need but sometimes a GUI might help too. Sometimes I would need to configure the OS, other times I would need to tweak their BOINC installation. What apps should I look into to facilitate a remote login to a terminal and possibly a Desktop/GUI? I need something fairly easy for the other party to install and configure. I use Kubuntu 12.04, they use various distros and desktops.

What tech limitations do I face? Any suggestions/ideas/discussion? Pros and cons? I know there are many help givers here so I am interested in you opinion regarding whether this can actually work. I don't necessarily need "the standard solution" if there is such a critter, something totally off the wall might suit my situation better. It only has to be reasonably easy for them.

I am a fan of BOINC so I'd like to see if I can help you out. So you have a few options the first things that came to mind were just setting up an sshd and then I realized that depending on network topography and all sorts of other problem thats out of the question. Then UltraVNC or TightVNC but those will all probably take too much to configure on users who are not tech savvy. So what you need is a plug and play or web based solution. So the first place I looked was Citrix Gotoassist but they don't mention anything about Linux support (anymore I could've sworn I used to use this) but they do support mac so maybe it would work?

Then I dug deeper and I think I may have found the solution, I'm setting it up right now between my VM and host machine and I'll let you know how it works. Its called Teamviewer: http://www.teamviewer.com/en/downloa...nloadAreaLinux
So long as this setup is pretty easy its probably going to be your best bet. I'll let you know what I learn in a bit.

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Okay here is what I found, I used a virtual machine of Fedora 16 and Ubuntu 12.04 (both are desktop type systems so using a 'server' style may be a bit different). The team viewer uses wine to launch the program so it has a number of dependencies that may need to be installed. All in all they only needed to download 6-10mb of files and install them in order to get it to work. If you can have them install using a package manager like for Fedora/Red Hat/CentOSFor Debian/Ubuntu (Or open the packages using the graphical installer). From there they can just run teamviewer by typing teamviewer into a terminal. The rest is automatically and all you need is their ID number and password.

This will probably be the simplest for you and your clients and you'll have full access to their desktop without having to worry about different network configurations etc. There are some cons to this in that it does still require some setup but I think its probably about a three step process. I would strongly recommend that if these people approach you beforehand you decide on a standard linux distro to recommend that will make your life easier (as you'll be more comfortable) and you'll now that this method should work. If you want to test it out let me know and I can allow you to connect to some of my VMs to try it out just send me a PM/email.

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