[CentOS] remote gnome setup

Thu Jan 28 16:10:13 UTC 2016
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>

On Thu, Jan 28, 2016 at 10:30:03AM -0500, ken wrote:
> When someone is sitting at their linux machine which is running gnome, and
> if that machine is running at 'init 5', and if they aren't yet logged in,
> they'll have something on their screen called the Greeter. If they
> successfully log in they'll have displayed on their monitor a 'gnome
> desktop'.  If they've logged in before, normally gnome (or more properly
> 'gdm') will display those apps which were open that last time (at the time
> they logged out from gnome).  By 'remote display' I mean that all of that,
> beginning with the Greeter, can be seen and used, it functions, not on the
> machine which one is sitting at, at that moment called the local machine,
> but another machine, a remote machine.

So, what you're asking for is to run XDMCP on the gdm on the centos5
system, which it does support, just add an [xdmcp] section to
/etc/gdm/custom.conf.  

However, the real question is how do you want to have clients contact
gdm via XDMCP?  X11 isn't a secure protocol, so just running 'X -query
remotehost' isn't really the best idea.  You'd have to open up the
port on the server in the firewall too.

I wouldn't suggest using this.  It'd probably be better to use VNC and
forward all traffic over SSH.

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>