Hello,

My debian server nas no GUI at all, and it can only be accesed by shh.
Lately, i have discover X11 forwarding, and its great, i can see my app's, but it only works over a LAN, otherwise, is too slow

FreeNX needs gnome..

what else could i use to connect it?

VNC and varieties (there should be x11vnc for current display or vnc4server for virtual displays), but it require X. By the way, first you wrote that server has no GUI at all, and then that you see your apps with X11, which is true? I suppose you have installed Xorg.

You don't need to have xorg installed for X11-forwarding, as far as I know.

What about the NX server/client/node from NoMachine? I just glanced at the website but couldn't determine dependencies...

Otherwise, I've used VNC on occasion with mixed results.

Here's a weird one; try 'xrdp'. This sets up an RDP-compatible X-Server, which you can log into using any standard Remote Desktop Connection client (ie: the Windows RDP client, or 'rdesktop' on Linux).

Just found out about this yesterday.

While I don't generally like promoting MS solutions, I find that RDP, in general, just works more smoothly than VNC.

Might as well take a peek at 2X.com 's stuff.

Hello all,

What is great about X over SSH is that my server has -> NO X SERVER INSTALLED, NOR DESKTOP, nothing <-
But i can see graphically any app from any other LAN computer.

Thats the greatness of x over ssh, BUT it turns to be very slow outside the lan.



I googled your alternatives, and all of them seems to require at least x.server and a minimal window manager like fluxbox (VNC), or the complete gnome/kde desktop (freeNX, xrdp)


I guess there is nothing like X over SSH...

i found that xrdp needs thightvnc in order to work, can you confirm?


also, i dont understand the relationship between VNC " :0 " and the displays...

does :1 means that i connect to the tty:1 running startx?

You know; I'm not certain.

I think that 'xrdp' itself does not require VNC, but it can function as a bridge between VNC and RDP. So it could just be that the package maintainer chose to link it that way, meaning the package has a dependency on it.

However, the documentation I've read doesn't seem to be particularly clear on that, or maybe I'm just being dense, so don't rely on what I'm saying as gospel

Ah; performance. Have you enabled SSH compression? If not, that will make quite a substantial difference; purely LAN performance will still be better though, esp. if your LAN->WAN bridge is narrow.

Alternatively, you might consider OpenVPN; not as flexible as SSH in some respects (you can't just set up ad-hoc connections, like you can with SSH but--unlike SSH--OpenVPN can tunnel anything--SSH can only tunnel TCP connections). Also, compression is generally enabled by default.

As for the server, an X-server must be installed on the system that wishes to host the display; otherwise, you couldn't have a display. There's just no way around this, currently.

Chances are you have an X-server installed on your server (due to package dependencies, if nothing else); you just don't have it enabled (which is a perfectly acceptable way of doing things, especially if you never intend to run a local display--my server is set up the same way).