Remote desktop connection in Linux

There are several techniques which can be used to establish a remote desktop connection between one computer and another.

X11 forwarding with OpenSSH - You can start an application on a remote computer and have its gui displayed on your local desktop.

Terminal Servers

Terminal servers display a complete desktop environment from a remote computer.

Remote X-Windows with XDMCP - XDMCP allows remote login and access to an entire GUI environment through an X display manager such as Gnome's GDM (so long as the option is enabled).

VNC

- VNC is also designed to forward an entire GUI environment. It is less efficient than X-Windows but the traffic is compressed (for low bandwidth connections), and clients exist for every major OS. It has a degree of protection for passwords, but the data itself is sent without encryption. It can be made more secure by tunnelling the connection via ssh. By using [x11vnc] you can also use VNC to connect to an already running X session.

NX

- NX is designed to allow you remote-controlling a graphical desktop.

rdesktop

- RDesktop is a Linux client that can attach to a Windows Server running Terminal Services or to the built-in Remote Desktop capability of Windows XP Pro. It is ideal for many who prefer to work from a Linux system, but who have an occasional need to access a Windows machine. RDesktop replicates a full Windows desktop in a window within Linux. -- also capabile of showing just one application

LTSP

- the Linux terminal server project allows you to set up a terminal server infrastructure including boot from PXE from the terminal server.