Remote Desktop between Ubuntu Machines

Question

My desktop and my laptop are connected to the same router. I want to be able to remote login from my laptop to my desktop. Laptop is 12.04 and desktop is 12.10.

I tried putting xrdp on my desktop, but remmina wouldn't work with it. I also tried the default screen-sharing, but it was very slow. Also tried rdesktop but it was very slow.

I am on 12.10, FreeNX looks like a good option but they don't have a 12.10 release. And when I tried to install the 12.04 release, I got errors about dependencies missing.

How can I get local-feeling remote login speeds?

Answer 1

Here's a quick walkthrough (if you are not familiar with vi, use nano or gedit) I make the assumption that you want to login to a gnome fallback session for a better speed of rendering

Open a terminal

Install the FreeNX PPA

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:freenx-team/ppa

Since there is only a version for Precise you need to cheat

sudo sed -i s/quantal/precise/g /etc/apt/sources.list.d/freenx-team-ppa-quantal.list 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install freenx-server gnome-session-fallback

Once installed, a bit of configuration:

sudo vi /etc/nxserver/node.conf

search for

#COMMAND_START_GNOME='gnome-session --session gnome-fallback'

and remove the # at the beginning

and while you are at it to prevent having no fonts displayed (bug in libcairo 1.12)

search for

#AGENT_EXTRA_OPTIONS_X="-nolisten tcp"

and replace by

AGENT_EXTRA_OPTIONS_X="-norender -nolisten tcp"

That should do the trick, if you select Unix-Gnome for the session it should log you in to the Gnome fallback session.