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I have a very powerful PC with Intel processor and a small Mac laptop with PowerPC processor. Both computers are with Ubuntu Linux. Mac laptop cannot play flash videos and I cannot install any Intel-CPU program on it (like Skype). So, it means I can install only open source applications on the laptop from Ubuntu repositories. I have two different Ubuntu system users on PC, say ME and SHE (and root as well :) ).

If I work as user ME on PC, then user SHE should also be able to access my PC remotely from her laptop and she should see a desktop of user SHE, not my desktop. She also must be able watch videos, flash, and listen sounds.

Is it possible with Ubuntu?

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It's a little late to post this, but for anyone who comes across this thread:

I use x2go for remote sessions with wound. It's based on the open sourced version of NXserver. Nomachine also has released a free trial of their latest NXserver which is better in some ways and not in others. It's closed source however.

Using either program, you can then use a program called 'virtualgl' to run 3D accellerated apps inside your 2D remote session. I haven't found a way to use virtualgl to provide 3D acceleration for the desktop session, only individual applications launched within the session using 'vglrun'. You can play 3D games over the network by starting them with vglrun, but I found that games run in wine don't work. :( You can run wine games via 'vglconnect' outside of x2go/Nomachine4, but unfortunately that doesn't have sound support, and I couldn't find any way of streaming sound, although I found a forum post outlining how that could be done, but it was over my head...

Getting virtualgl to work for multiple user sessions is a bit of a pain too, because you have to make changes to your X-server configuration. There are instructions on that here: http://www.virtualgl.org/vgldoc/2_1/#hd005002

But those are old, and it was fiddly because I had to remove lightdm and install GDM from memory, and I seem to recall my computer getting screwed up when I enabled auto-login with GDM set up in place of lightdm...

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  • Also I was doing some video tests today, and found that I couldn't get x2go or Nomachine4 to play videos smoothly at any higher resolution than about 1024x768. I'd really like to know if there's a program that could handle HD resolution video. I've had a go at using spice with buggy and inconsisten results: spice-space.org/page/Main_Page I could only get it working under Fedora, because it's tied to the Fedora KVM virtualisation program, it can't be used outside of a KVM virtual machine with the red hat mumbo jumbo that only seems to work on fedora and Rhel.
    – Damon
    Oct 20, 2012 at 6:43
  • Oh, and to install x2go use the instructions on the ppa: launchpad.net/~x2go/+archive/stable The setup guide on the x2go site is rubbish.
    – Damon
    Oct 20, 2012 at 6:45
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Just remote desktop is trivial. However, sound and especially any video rendered using hardware is almost impossible to do.

For example TightVNC is excellent free remote desktop software. There is EsounD (remote sound daemon), but it's pretty old already. See also Wikipedia comparison table. FreeNX seems to be good candidate for remote desktop software with audio support.

However, this is not going to help with dual audio (one for local and one for remote). That is possible (to route some programs to different sound card or different channel) but I couldn't find any good reference on that.

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  • Are you sure that FreeNX and FreeRDP support audio? I can't find any reference.
    – psihodelia
    Feb 27, 2011 at 12:58
  • FreeNX documentation seems to be in rather bad state. See for example linux-archive.org/centos/… (there is multiple forum threads on FreeNX audio support). I removed FreeRDP, obviously it's not helping on this problem.
    – Olli
    Feb 27, 2011 at 13:05

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