Remote desktop connection - which one?

[Guinpen]

Hello,

I have a PC at my office and a laptop at home, both running Gentoo. I want to be able to easily connect to one from the other, see the graphical desktop, and the like (not just comandline ssh). But there are several solutions, and I don't have the time to test all of them. So far I know of VNC, krd, FreeNX. Which one is best? Or, if there is no best one, what are the differences?

Thanks!

[tony]

Personally I would look into Xdmcp, which stands for "X Display Manager Control Protocol." Basically it allows you to send the X display commands from one X server to another. There's a wiki on setting it up at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_XDMCP. If this won't fit the bill you can always ssh in with X forwarding turned on so the graphical output will show on your local machine[/code], something like:

[Guinpen]

Hm, you say VNC is insecure, but somewhere (Wikipedia I think) I read that XDMCP is insecure by design. While X forwarding is fine for single apps, if a little slow, I would really prefer to get the whole desktop.

[Sanderfox]

VNC over the internet might be a little faster, but it's certainly not fast

[tony]

While XDMCP does have it's share of security problems, it's way more secure than VNC or even RDP. If you really want full out security then SSH w/X forwarding seems to be the best/only way to go unless you feel like trying to wrap one of the others in an SSL tunnel ^_^.

Just for laughs I tried SSH'ing into one of my remote boxes and ran 'startkde' just to see how long it would take... way too long!

It wasn't really clear in my previous post but I meant to say that XDMCP is a good solution since it's built into the X server and seems to be the fastest of the group from my experience.

It does seem surprising to me that with as paranoid as networking people usually are that no one has yet to implement a secure method of whole-desktop remote connections.