active desktop from terminal
 

Hi everyone,

I wanted to ask you guys, I have a RHEL box here at work that I'm using to play with. My boss and I were trying to connect from his computer, and he was trying to start a GUI interface from his PC. I have a firewall in the RHEL so I can only connect from SSH client. I would like to be able to connect from another PC and be able to use the active KDE desktop environment, is this possible? Or can I only use this from the RHEL box itself?

Thanks

Huh?

I'm sorry I'm very new at linux and I probably didn't ask the question right. Basically what I want to do is when I connect via an SSH client like Putty to my Red Hat box from a remote computer, I want to be able to see the GUI interface that I see when I startup linux from the machine itself. The GUI interface being KDE or Gnome I think that's what they are called.

ssh is a text-only connection, just like telnet, ftp, and others.

If you want to allow access to a GUI on your machine, you'll have to provide a different service. The (arguably) most popular one is VNC. The normal routine is, a user logs into the Linux machine, starts a VNC server, then connects with another application: a VNC viewer.

A couple of things: Configuring VNC to do what you want can be a bit frustrating if it's your first time to try it. A lot of users have an initial problem of getting a gray screen with a black, 'X' shaped cursor. If you try VNC and get that, then the configuration files are not starting up KDE properly.

Second: It is posible to have VNC connections go through your SSH port; which makes it so you only have to open one port in your firewall. This would be an advanced setup, and I wouldn't try messing with it until you have VNC working without it. It's referred to as "port forwarding".

There are a number of different VNC flavors (TightVNC, RealVNC, TridiaVNC, etc.). Check your Red Hat CDs and see if there's an RPM available. It may already be installed on the system. Once installed, read the man pages:
man vncserver
man vncviewer

If you'll only be connecting from a Windows box, then you'll need to download a VNC viewer for that box (any viewer you find should work).

Dark_Helmet,

I really appreciate your help. I've been struggling with trying to learn linux and I'm not giving up. I will definitely try vnc. thanks again

:)