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I have a fairly powerful desktop computer where I can run two instances of a game (one natively and one in a win7-64 bit virtualbox). I was wondering if I there was any way to connect a laptop to my desktop where the laptop could log in as a user and play the games on my computer as if they are playing directly from my desktop, while I also logged in and doing things? I have a fairly old laptop that has no other use which is why I ask.

So is there any way of doing this? Like streaming the audio and video for that user out to the laptop, and the input events from the laptop's keyboard in? The laptop and desktop would be linked with ethernet not wireless so there would definitely be the bandwidth. It might just be a dream, but it would be really cool. Thanks for any answers!

The Solution:

I got it working! Using Freedom-Ben's post I setup everything in those two links to get x11 forwarding with audio working. The one problem you will have is that when you are using a really old laptop as the client, any OpenGL applications wont work very well. This is because it forwards all the opengl calls to the client. I found an amazing thing called virtualgl, which renders everything on my desktop, and sends only the frames to the client. If you are interested in this, visit this post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=134207 . It works great when on a local machine, very little bandwidth needed.

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Dude that is an awesome idea! You should be able to accomplish this using SSH X forwarding. The instructions for setting this up can be found on unix.stackexchange. Using X forwarding you can SSH from the laptop into the desktop and run graphical programs over the wire. To get the audio working, check out this question on SuperUser. Good luck! Let me know how it goes.

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    Thanks for your response I will certainly try this I will get back here in a few hours!
    – Zach
    May 10, 2013 at 3:55
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    Got it working I edited my question with the solution. Thanks for the help!
    – Zach
    May 10, 2013 at 19:03
  • That's awesome! I'm gonna have to give this a try. Thanks!
    – Freedom_Ben
    May 10, 2013 at 22:56

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