[CentOS] remote gnome setup

Thu Jan 28 08:24:48 UTC 2016
ken <gebser at mousecar.com>

It's been surprisingly difficult to set up a remote display between two 
CentOS boxes, one headless running v.5.9 and the other a new laptop 
running v.7.2.  Since the one machine is headless, it should be obvious 
which is to display the desktop of the other.

The two machines are on the same local network, yet there is iptables 
running on both of them.  But it's not a big deal for me to add rules 
for them.  There's already a solid ssh connection from the laptop to the 
headless machine.

I recently set up remote display of applications from a Raspian (Debian 
running on a Raspberry Pi) to my Android phone-- that took only about an 
hour-- and (quite a while ago) an X server displaying apps from another 
Linux box-- was also trivial to do-- which is why it's been a mystery 
why using gdm is so difficult.  Since I've tried a lot of different 
settings over the past several days, it would take too long to describe 
them all.  If perhaps someone could describe the steps from the 
beginning, that would be much simpler and would give others seeking the 
same on the internet a doc to work from.

So does anyone know how this is done?