Remote Desktop Recommendations (2)

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Folks

I’m looking for a way to access a GUI desktop on a CentOS 7 server from a Windows client. I have tried:
– X2go from EPEL (fails immediately, apparently they are working on a solution, but…)
– Freenx (doesn’t exist for EL7)

Both the above work fine with CentOS 6.

I’m looking for a solution that works over the internet from afar. My earlier posting failed to mention this.

Are there any known working solutions?

Thanks…

Mystified but not urgent in San Francisco David

7 thoughts on - Remote Desktop Recommendations (2)

  • I tunnel VNC over SSH when using it at a distance. There are numerous tutorials online that will tell you how to do this. The one and only time I set this up to run on a Windows machine, I used a program named putty to create a SSH connection to CentOS server machine, and then ran the tightvnc client program on the Windows machine.

    “yum install tigervnc-server” gets you what you need on the server side. Putty and tightvnc for Windows are available for download from their respective websites.

  • X2go works, just not with Gnome3. Use KDE or MATE from epel. Also, there was a bug in a recent x2goserver package that would fail if you didn’t have the x2goserver-xsession package installed. The fix for that was done but I don’t know if it ever got out of epel-testing.

  • Do you need a full blown desktop? Otherwise you could just tunnel some X11 app via SSH (eg firefox, virt-manager).

  • At 09:33 PM 11/16/2014, you wrote:

    Thanks, Les, for that detail. I knew that x2go had a known bug, but didn’t know the name of the missing package. I explicitly installed it, but I still get failure asking for the MATE desktop. To summarize, my client shows the X2go screen, then it goes away. On the server, I see in /var/log/messages, a sequence such as:

    ———————-

  • The version that is working for me is x2goserver-4.0.1.18-3.el7.x86_64. If that is not what you have, try:
    yum–enablerepo=epel-testing update x2goserver You might also have to do something to clean up the old sessions that the broken version had started – I can’t remember what else I might have done. Also, if you can, make sure that MATE is working at the console, and for the first attempts turn off the drive mapping and sound to have fewer things that can break.

    So far I am still mostly using NX/freenx on a C6 system as my main desktop with occasional ‘ssh -Y …’ connections from there to C7 for GUI programs. I think x2go will be a usable replacement, but the windows client has some conflict with ‘synergy’ which I also use to share the keyboard/mouse with an adjacent laptop so I haven’t switched yet.

  • At 09:30 AM 11/17/2014, you wrote:

    Starting from a text login, what’s the “startx” equivalent to start MATE? I see
    /bin/startx (starts gnome3)
    /bin/startxfce4 (starts xfce4)

    Thanks for your help David