Remote connection to linux from windows
 

Hello All,

I have 5 windows O S installed computers and one Fedora 6 installed system. I just want to know how do i connect to Fedora from windows using Remote desktop connection or i just want to get linux desktop from my Wndows Machine?

Please help....iS any package that i have to installed?
Where do i get?

Thanks
Anu

All you need to do is run a VNC server on your linux system.
Then you can install any vnc program like tightvnc or realvnc, and just connect to your linux desktop.

However if your linux is running KDE, you can enable desktop sharing, and you can connect to that very desktop using the vnc program in your windows m/c

FreeNX is a great tool and you get a single license free (as I remember) - It's an all in one and does everything for you like RDP

Also you can use and Xserver like Xming on your Windows boxes and pull what you like to it using Putty and X11 forwarding over ssh

FreeNX
http://www.nomachine.com/download.php

Xming
http://www.straightrunning.com/XmingNotes/

Putty
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~s.../download.html

I tried a bunch of different methods for using Linux systems from Windows, with mixed results.

For non GUI, the best results I've gotten have been by installing Cygwin on the Windows system and including putty in the packages selected during Cygwin setup and then using that version of putty to run non GUI programs on Linux from the Windows desktop. General performance as well as special issues such as the clipboard work a lot better for non GUI Linux programs in putty than for anything in a Linux GUI used from Windows. So if a large fraction of what you want to do on Linux from Windows is non GUI, consider using putty for that instead of using a command window inside a Linux GUI.

For GUI, using an X server program on Windows is generally more convenient than any kind of VNC. I tried very hard to get Xming to work and just couldn't figure it out. I ended up using the xwin server in Cygwin instead (notice the pattern here. After trying many other ways, just install Cygwin and select the packages you want from Cygwin setup.)
I also tried very hard to get the more advanced modes of Cywin xwin to work, such as bringing up each Linux window as a separate window on the Windows desktop and/or launching Linux GUI programs from commands in putty sessions. How to do such things seems to be well documented, but I never got it to work. The only mode I got working was to bring up an entire Linux desktop as one window in Windows (with the individual Linux windows inside that big one) similar to the behavior of Windows remote desktop.

I also used VNC for a while, using a putty session (from Windows to Linux) to create a Linux X display that I could then connect to with a VNC client on Windows. After setting the right environment variables it continued to play well with putty sessions, so I had max performance and convenience for Linux non GUI programs as individual putty windows on the Windows desktop, while all the Linux GUI programs were in the VNC session. It might be better than what I got working with xwin, but I never nailed down enough scripting to automate the startup, so it was less convenient than just using xwin.

When I was playing with VNC, I installed and tried a bunch of different VNC programs for the Windows side. I did that because at the same time I was trying to find something better than remote desktop for controlling one Windows system from another, and experimenting with ways to share a remote desktop (run demos or provide remote assistance or simply peek at a remote system enough to see if whoever was using it remotely last was done). I didn't look at any of those same issues on Linux (many don't even apply). Whatever Windows VNC software happened to be handy seemed equally good at connecting to the X display that I had set up for VNC access on Linux.