Remote desktop connectivity from Windows 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Question

What would be the best way to establish remote desktop connectivity from a Windows 7 machine to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6? The machines reside on the same network.

Charmion

Answer 1

For graphic usage, you have at least the following options:

• SPICE (http://spice-space.org/download.html)
• NoMachine's NX Server (http://www.nomachine.com/)
• VNC (http://www.redhat.com/magazine/006apr05/features/vnc/)

SPICE is newer and pretty slick. I've used NX Server for years and it's great. VNC is pretty unsecure, so use that as a last ditch option.

Goatsbeard

I just chased my tail looking for information about SPICE. It's a cool idea, and works great with the KVM or QEMU VirftualMachines. There's even a spice4xen project for the XEN VM. However, I could not find ANYTHING on how to use this inside a VMWare guest. – Oxygenate

Answer 2

XRDP is a Remote Desktop Server implementation for Linux. It allows you to use the standard Remote Desktop client that ships with Windows to connect to remote Linux desktops. I've had good results using it in Fedora so I'd imagine it'd handle okay in RHEL.

Here's a tutorial on setting it up: http://sirjune.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/howto-xrdp-on-fedora-rhel/

Eurypterid

Answer 3

Adding to the comment from @BoeroBoy. You have to also look into the firewall. I used TightVNC to connect from my workstation(Windows 7) to Red Hat Linux 6, but in vain was not able to(even after activating the Remote Access from System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop).

So one should also look into System -> Administration -> Firewall and allocate necessary access for process and/or port(s).

Superclass