Is there a standard unix way of connecting to a linux desktop without using vnc?

Have a look at xdmcp. It allows you to log into an X session remotely in much the same way as you would locally. You'll need an X server at the remote end though, so you'll either need some flavour of *nix or something like Cygwin/X.

ah, yes, that thing I never bothered reading up on, perhaps now would be the time to start...

thanks.

The standard way is to run an X windows server locally. You can for example use "ssh -X username@host" to run individual applications on the remote computer and have the window show up on your computer. X Windows was designed orignally when the computer was a mainframe and the users ran X window terminals. However it isn't easy to set this up securely when you are connected to the internet are can't trust all users on the network.

The xorg website will have howto's and more information. There is a paper on the security methods and problems on the NSA website.
http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/papers/X11_Study.pdf

Your best bet may be to see if your distro can configure gdm or kdm to allow remote logins. This will set up xauth and other setup files properly. It can be difficult to go from the default settings to one that allows remote sessions manually.

I don't understand why this is not the prefered way to connect to Linux from a windows machine. Wouldn't it be better to offload the graphics processing to windows?

why which is not the preferred way? huh?

Is that a joke or real? I can't tell any more...

Is it not?
Maybe because a lot of people just joined the linux world recently from Windows and are used to slow and inefficient VNC?
You don't even need ssh BTW.
just set the DISPLAY environment variable. ssh is if you want a secure and encrypted connection. You don't need that locally.

$ export DISPLAY=192.168.0.3:0.0
$ xclock

xclock will be displayed on machine 192.168.0.3 on desktop 0 and not on localhost. Simple and efficient, X was designed from start to run on a remote computer.

yes, I'm aware of this, what I want it a full remote logon window, similar to vnc style, or to be able to connect to the :0.0 display on the remote host, I did this before with a little vnc setup (otherwise it gives a new display, whereas I wanted a more single display the way the windows version works...)

If I can't find another way of doing this then I may just do the vnc thing again. But I'll give xdmcp a try first, possible freenx...

X-Windows. You'd think it would be easy to run X-Windows on a windows desktop but logged into the linux box, and get the same KDE screen you get on the Linux console, but it doesn't seem to work that way.

The beauty of ssh (or "ssh -X") is that you don't have to set the DISPLAY variable explicitly.

I would recommend installing Cygwin/X. It is free, and also gives you the ability to run x-windows based programs, like gv on your local machine, as well as shell based utilities such as awk, sed and grep. The documentation that comes with it details many options. Using x-windows directly or through an SSH tunnel, directs the graphics for the session to your windows computer where the windows computer renders it. Vnc on the other hand renders it first on the remote computer. Delta graphics are sent down the network and used to recreate the screen on your windows machine. This makes it easier to use on a windows machine with a vnc client, but is not the most efficient way of doing things. It's just the windows way of doing things.

You may run into some roadblocks due to the security settings of the Linux host. Your best bet is if the distro lets you set it up this way, and does it in the most secure method possible. You may want to read through the Administrator's Manual. The distro programmers may have done the hard work ahead of time.

The easiest method is to use a secure shell client on the windows machine, running an x-windows server such as Cygwin/X. After running xterm in cygwin/X, enter the command "ssh -X username@host". Then you can enter the name of the graphical program that you want to run.

Another option is to run linux instead of windows of course.

Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for!

I got X-Cygwin running, it's very amazing. KDE from my SuSE server on my 17 inch notebook display! It was a bit slower than the console, still I ran Java Studio Creator fine.

You have to go to x.cygwin.com, run their setup program, then copy all the dll's from cygwin/bin to cygwin/usr/X11R6/bin.

the command is xwin -query linuxhost -fullscreen.

You shouldn't have to copy the DLLs....when I installed Cygwin/X, it all just worked "out of the box". If it doesn't, it's worth trying to find out why.

Xming and PuTTY work like a charm for me as an alternative to vnc. In fact, I have made this the main solution at work for people without a linux workstation.