Can I access Ubuntu from Windows remotely?

Question

I have Ubuntu installed on my work computer. I am wondering whether I could have access to it from another computer with Windows installed. If so, could you give a step by step guide, please? Thank you!

Answer 1

Yes, you can access Ubuntu from Windows remotely.

Taken from this article.

Follow these steps :

Step 1 – Install xRDP

Open Terminal (Crtl+Alt+T) and execute the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xrdp

Step 2 – Install XFCE4 ( Unity doesn't seem to support xRDP in Ubuntu 14.04; although, in Ubuntu 12.04 it was supported ). That's why we install Xfce4.

sudo apt-get install xfce4

Step 3 – Configure xRDP

In this step, we modify two files to make sure xRDP uses Xfce4. First we need to create, or edit, our .xsession file in our home directory. We can either use nano or simply redirect an echo statement (easier):

echo xfce4-session >~/.xsession

The second file we need to edit is the startup file for xRDP, so it will start Xfce4.

sudo nano /etc/xrdp/startwm.sh

The content should look like this (pay attention to the last line and ignore . /etc/X11/Xsession):

#!/bin/sh

if [ -r /etc/default/locale ]; then
  . /etc/default/locale
  export LANG LANGUAGE
fi

startxfce4

Step 4 – Restart xRDP

To make all these changes effective, restart xRDP as such:

sudo service xrdp restart

Testing your xRDP connection

On the computer that will remotely control your Ubuntu machine, start you RDP client. Windows comes standard with a Remote Desktop client (mstsc.exe – you can start it from a command prompt, or find the shortcut to Remote Desktop under Accessories). Or Search 'remote' in start (Windows 7) Or 'remote' in search box in Windows 8.

Whichever client you use, most will work with either the computer network name or IP address of your Ubuntu machine.

To find the IP address on your Ubuntu box, type:

hostname -I

(note: this is a capital “i”)

Enter IP address of your Ubuntu machine. For example:

Depending on your RDP client capabilities and settings (for example: Microsoft RDP Client allows automatic login), you might or might not see the login screen. Here we enter our Ubuntu username and password and click “OK”

You are done,enjoy

PS: There are some good points mentioned in comments, so I thought to sum them up.

• If you want to access Ubuntu from outside network, you'll need your Ubuntu at work to have it's own, proper, internet IP address - a fairly unlikely scenario. To work it otherwise, you need the externally visible address of work, AND have port forwarding set to direct incoming RDP requests to your work computer on the router. (Mark Williams)

• To use the Ubuntu MATE desktop meta-session, replace last line startxfce4 in startwm.sh with mate-session. (Frank N)

• You can use your actual machine name (by typing hostname) rather than your IP as it might be more stable on dynamic IPs in future sessions. (Frank N)

Answer 2

MobaXterm

http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

Freeware implementation the X server on windows.

No need to install anything on Ubuntu.

After you connect, you start out with a shell.

Then, if you start a program from the shell, e.g.:

xeyes

xeyes opens as a separate native Windows window.

It just worked out of the box between Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 through a VPN.

It incurs an acceptable lag and resolution loss, even for complex applications like firefox and eclipse, but it is clearly not just dumbly streaming your desktop as video, and actually implementing X widgets.

One annoyance is that if you opened the window at work, and then you get home, you have to start a new instance of the app, and you can't see the already opened window. This is made further annoying by applications that work in single window mode, e.g. browsers: you will have to search for how to force a new instance, and then you will have two instances running.

Cygwin/X

https://x.cygwin.com/

GPL alternative to MobaXterm. Haven't tried it yet, but behaviour should be the same in theory: https://youtu.be/ENkOEknSLv4?t=105

VNC

I've tried the following programs, but they were sending the desktop as video, which incurred unacceptable screen resolution loss / mouse inaccuracy / network bandwidth.

Servers (run on Ubuntu):

• Vino. Ships pre-installed, but there are compatibility issues with some available Windows clients: Gnome 3.10 sharing desktop --- how to configure the security type for VNC?

Clients (run on Windows):

• TigerVNC

PuTTY

The go-to solution if all you want is a text terminal via SSH.

It is very convenient as it integrates both an xterm emulator and SSH / telnet and other protocols in a single package.

Then add tmux attach to the mix, and you can use the exact same terminals on work and at home, which is awesome. There are however some annoying glitches with environment variables, particularly DISPLAY: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/75681/why-do-i-have-to-re-set-env-vars-in-tmux-when-i-re-attach

Answer 3

The best one I found is x2go.

Install on the linux machine http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:x2goserver

Install client on the windows machine: http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/download:start

Tune compression if it feels slow: (TL;DR use 4k-png) https://uwaterloo.ca/science-computing/student-support/x2go-tutorial