Is there 'remote access' products for Linux like - GoToMyPC or ???
 

I'm a linux newbie and would really appriceate some help.

RDP that is built right into Windows and allows remote access and control of other PC's over the net.

GoToMyPC.com and LogMeIn.com are two popular 'remote access' cloud based products that do about the same thing.

I understand that SSH is a command line option for linux box's...

My Questions:

1 - Is there a GUI Remote Access tool for linux box's?

2 - Will it allow the administrator to log onto a remote linux box and
... start and stop a running applications on the remote computer
... transfer files to or from the remote computer

3 - Will this app run on small linux distros/installations... or does it require a robust linux distro/installation?

4 - Are there both "cloud based" applications for remote access/control of linux box's... AND normal applications that are installed on the administrators computer and installed on the remote client computer?

Thanks for any help.

Why the heck would anybody who even knows about RDP consider GoToMyPC.com or LogMeIn.com... their is no point behind those services since everything they sell is already in windows you just got to know how to use them... and it's not that hard to look up RDP either, all versions of windows have RDP clients and I know their is an official RDP client for Mac OS X too that can be downloaded from microsoft, not sure about linux tho.

Anyway to answer your questions,

1. Virtual Network Connection or VNC for short. VNC as standard is an unencrypted protocol but their are encrypted versions of the protocol depending on if the server supports it or it can be tunneled over SSH for security.

2. Sounds dangerous, "administrators" or root, should not be directly logged on as, however it can be done, it'd be safer to use normal ssh in that situtation and use sudo or su for such actions as these are safer methods to do this, root logins should be disabled for security reasons.

3. If the distribution supports VNC then it should work, And then even if it isn't supported I can't see why small distributions can't just have the applications compiled for them anyway.

4. Does this question even make sence? I know Adderlink KVMs have java based VNC clients so they can be certainly done, not sure if their are any others around, personally I would suggest to just download a proper client anyway. Their are downloadable clients I have seen in the past that don't even need to be installed, they just run (simular to how putty just runs). Linux distributions will be easy to get VNC clients for, Mac support for VNC seems poor at best, no real good clients tho the Adderlink Java based on does seem to work well. Naturally you have to install a vnc server on the server however.