Login Graphically to A Computer in a Remote Location using freeNX

The ability to login graphically into any computer from a remote location has a number of uses. In my case it allows me to create a setup were students in my school can easily login graphically into the universities computer lab and use many of the applications which are installed there (like Matlab which is only licensed to run on our lab computers) It also allows me to log into my work computer from home. To create this setup we would need a tool called Freenx.

FreeNX
FreeNX is a system that allows you to access your desktop from another machine over the Internet. You can use this to login graphically to your desktop from a remote location.

Advantages of FreeNX
One advantage of FreeNX is that it is based on the SSH Protocol so your packets are transferred over an encrypted channel which in human language means nasty people can’t see what you are doing and potentially compromise your computer

Installation

Installation FreeNX is in Two Phrase the server and the client

Server Installation

and we install with:
sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get install freenx

That is all that is needed for the installation of freenx server on our remote machine.

Client Installation

The client is installed on the machine you want to login from.

There are Two type of FreeNX clients available the non free and open source version (and freedom hating version :) ) and the free and open source version

The Non-free version
This is the official NX version and can not be installed from the Ubuntu repository but can be deb version for ubuntu can be downloaded from here
Double click to install.
Once installed you find it at Application-Internet-NX Client for Linux

The Free and Open Source version can be downloaded from the Ubuntu repository by running:
sudo apt-get install qtnx
Once installed you find it at Application-Internet-QTNX

Usage
What i really love about FreeNX is its usage, its very easy to use and all your do is launch the client which once installed can be found under /Application/Internet/Nx Client for LInux

Wizard

Once you start the Program it displays a wizard which would guide you through the configuration process

session

=Session: First Thing you do is create a session which is like a profile of the remote machine you want to connect to. You can have many sessions of different remote machines which allows you to easily choose a session and login to the machine configure to the session.
Host: The IP address of the remote machine you want to login to
Select you Internet Type: Here is were you also get to indicate what type of internet connection you are running, NX compresses your data over the network so the slower your internet connection the higher the compression rate of your data (or so it seems) then you also put in the . Leave the port as 22 since that is the default that ssh uses (unless you have ssh using another port on the remote machine)