Accessing your computer remotely is critical now-a-days. When I’m at work I find myself needing files, documents, and other things from my home computer. When I was running Windows XP I used logmein.com to remotely access my computer. The reason logmein worked so well was because it used port 80; most other ports are blocked at work, so other programs wouldn’t work. Since my home computer is now Ubuntu Feisty Fawn I have to try a different route.

Fortunately, Ubuntu comes with a built-in VNC support. It’s easy to implement:

System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop

Under sharing select:

• Allow other users to view your desktop
• Allow other users to control your desktop

Under security select:

• Require users to enter this password:
• Password: PICK A DIFFICULT PASSWORD

This is not the most secure method of having remote desktop on your linux box, but this is the easiest way. Since ubuntu is utilizing VNC it will use ports 5900 – 590x depending on how you have it setup. 5900 will be the port you want.

To access my linux box remotely from an XP box I use a free web-based VNC viewer from s-code.com, which I believe is open sourced.  It is much like logmein.com, except logmein.com also supports java, but not linux.

http://www.s-code.com/products/viewerx/webvnc.aspx

This lovely little site will allow you to access your VNC at home on whatever port via http port 80. Firewalls control what ports you can access, but as long as a port is open you can get to anything.

Oh yes Ubuntu Feisty Fawn has been released and it is quite a good release. I installed Feisty Fawn on my old box, not a beast, but it can still move. The Linux Kernel has come along way since I first installed Warty Warthog a few years ago. Every release gets smoother and smoother and the ease of installing software is amazing. The entire Open Source Community is maturing more and more every year. The piece of software I am most impressed with is VirtualBox, a free open source virtualization tool by Innotek. It is like VMWare Workstation, but FREE and it is quite good. Though I still dig VMPlayer, it’s also free, without all the bell and whistles.

Since I got Windows Vista from School for free I decided to install it in VirtualBox. Installation was uneventful, VirtualBox said support for Vista was experimental, but it went off without a hitch. Vista ran very smoothly which was surprising, but it is Windows Vista Business, so it doesn’t have all the eye candy. Vista is very strange, Microsoft made some weird choices for UI presentation. I mean I guess it’s cool, but it is such a departure from Windows 95-XP. I guess that is what they were going for but I think it is going to confuse a lot of people. It is scrolling menus and such, but I will give it a try and see how it works. The default Windows icons and wallpapers are nice though? Quit tugging on my heart Microsoft, *END SARCASM* hehe.

Oh yeah back to VirtualBox. The UI face is easy and intuitive and there are no surprises – straight forward. Such a great concept. I love virtualization it makes moving things much easier when everything is combined into one image. Also it helps make systems less hardware dependent, Linux will run on anything, but Windows will not and that is life.

My next project is to VMware convert my main XP box and install feisty on it. I can’t wait for the semester to be over! 2 weeks to go woo.