Remote Desktop using VNC and FVWM Crystal

This is one of my favorite things. Most of the times, I do not like having a development environment on my own machine because of various constraints like RAM, OS etc. It also helps in environments when DB connections cannot be made over VPN and only internal servers can access them. Thus, for working remotely, this is the best practice. 

I have always followed a policy of creating an environment for myself on the development server and working on that. For this, sometimes I require to have a windows manager too. FVWM crystal serves as one of the best windows manager I have ever worked with. It is light weight, superfast over VPN and renders pretty nicely. 

Official documentation page from Ubuntu

Quick steps to get you setup for Ubuntu

## Installing VNC Server on Ubuntu and FVWM-Crystal

deploy$ sudo apt-get install vnc4server fvwm-crystal

## Starting VNC Server - You can give the geometry settings you like.
## Note that this is a normal alphabetical 'x' and not a multiply sign.
deploy$ vncserver -geometry 1200x800 

## For the first time, it would ask you for a VNC Password
## Please enter your desired password for logging into your remote machine.

## The above command would start the VNC server at 
## terminal :1 or :2 depending upon what is available. 
## To kill a particular port run
deploy$ vncserver -kill :1

Accessing the VNC Remote desktop

There are a variety of clients available but mostly on Mac and Windows I have used RealVNC and on Linux I have used Remmina. There are varied functionalities with these clients and you can choose according to what functionalities you would require.

To open the remote desktop, open the client and enter the URL in the format :. Here port is the terminal port on which the windows manager has got started when the above command of vncserver was given. For example 10.0.0.23:1. One you do this, you would be able to login to remote terminal using fvwm-crystal or any other default windows manager. If you have multiple windows manager, the suggestion is to edit the ".vnc/xstartup" which is there in your Home directory to configure it.

Important FAQ - If you are not able to access the remote machine, then your server might be blocking the VNC port. In such case, you would require to tunnel it to do the same. Follow the steps of Port forwarding in Ubuntu Documentation to achieve the same.

## Find out the remote port where VNC is running - Mostly 5900 or 5901
deploy$ netstat -tpln | grep -iR xvnc
## On your local system, create a tunnel
deploy$ ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 joe@remotehost

## Connect to remote machine from VNC client giving IP 
## of localhost as "localhost:5900"