Can anyone recommend a FAST remote desktop client (I'm using Ubuntu). I've tried Remote Desktop Viewer, Remina and a couple of others and the performance is very disappointing compared to Windows Remote Desktop. The screen update is so slow that it is basically unusable, even on the worst quality setting with compression turned on etc.

Anything better out there?

Have you tried this http://www.nomachine.com/select-package.php?os=linux&id=1

Many Ubuntu forums say it is the fastest for native Ubuntu remote desktop

When I was experimenting a while ago it was good.

I have also just installed Teamviewer on my Ubuntu system but have not been able to give it a good try yet as our work connection is very slow

i assume you are talking about connecting to a windoze box? i use tsclient which is a GUI wrapper for the rdesktop command line client. if you are connecting to either a vista or win7 box though, you will have terrrible performance unless you disable the graphical enhancement on the windoze machine (ie. aero). i always set my win box at the office to windows classic theme before i leave, just in case i need to do a remote connection.

k

On Ubuntu (and windows xp, win 7 and my Mac) I use teamviewer from www.teamviewer.com, it is free and works well.

No I just want to connect several Ubuntu machines, I've almost stopped using Windows entirely now. I have two desktops and two notebooks. I forgot to mention, I've also turned off desktop/window effects on both machines, because it really mangles the performance.

I think I've found the reason why RDP works better than VNC: RDP is aware of fonts and various controls so rather than send them as images it just tells your computer to draw them locally, saving a lot of bandwidth. VNC sends everything as images of the remote desktop, which is considerably less efficient.

I'm not too keen on using third party services unless there is no other way.

this should be a good topic for wednesday night.

i have always used vnc without any performance issues that bother me, SUPPOSEDLY freeNX is superior but i have never been dissatisfied with vnc so haven't bothered testing it. i have used ssh with a remote xsession which i recall was pretty fast, but i was doing it from windoze (with putty and cygwin), and using a very minimal window manager (afterstep, IIRC). i assume (again, when will i learn) you have tried vino/vinagre, which are the defaults in ubuntu?

k

I second the nomachine option mentioned on the 2nd post.

I use it and absolutely LOVE it. It blows VNC out of the water and its free to boot. Can't go wrong with it.

what is it that SSH can't do?

SSH is text only. I have key-based authentication set up for all machines and can login from anywhere, even my phone. But for some jobs I do need a GUI.

I tried no machine but it crashes on all my Ubuntu boxes ('cannot write X cookie') or something.

SSH is text only.

you may want to search for X11+forwarding+SSH. not using it (just plain SSH) so i wont be able to help much but that should do it...

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hope my first reply on this thread did not sound harsh. if it did, it was not intentional

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Not at all, don't worry about it.

I finally settled on a workaround, its quite ugly but it works:

I leave my remote work computer running Windows and connect to it from home over remote desktop/Hamachi. And I run Linux on it as a virtual machine. This gives the vastly better remote desktop performance of RDP while still letting me work in Linux remotely.

I know, I know. I told you it was ugly