Hello, I've lurking here for a week or so, learning all kinds of good stuff. I've set up a low cost box with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx at home behind a router, and managed to get remote access running. My goal is to be able to host a small website and work on it remotely, so I isntalled ftp (vsftpd). When I tried to edit the vsftpd.conf file in Vinagre from work, I could only open it read-only, no surprise. When I tried 'sudo gedit' or 'sudo gedit /etc/vsftpd.conf' from terminal in Vinagre, I received the prompt for the password to elevate privileges (again, expected); however, after I hit Enter, nothing happens. I've tried a bunch of different things, but I can't get it to work. I can stop & start my ftp service with 'sudo service vsftpd stop/start' and it seems to work fine. Any thoughts? Thx!

You can try gksudo, or just "su" first. But really, do you need VNC for editing a file? You can just SSH in and use vi(m) or ssh -X and forward gedit.

I can't really help you with your question because I've never log into a box using the x server. I've always done everything via SSH which is the suggested way to manage a remote server.

But if you are using ubuntu desktop version I don't think ssh is running. You will need to enable it. If you have the server version then ssh should be working. If you decide to manage the server via ssh you can use command line editors. There are lots of them. Vim in ubuntu is funky and from what I know you have to install the full version to get all the functions of it. Nano is a great and user friendly text editor.

Here are some command line editors you can look into.
nano
vim or vi
emacs

You use them like this

nano /etc/yourserver/configfile.conf

You may need to sudo or su to edit system files.