[SOLVED]Remote desktop access possible before the DE loaded?

[Trashking]

I can't get remote desktop access until the desktop environment has been loaded (user logged in), in Cinnamon.

Any protocol (VNC, XRDP, FreeNX) on any release will do.
Thanks

[Neil Edmond]

Technically, it's not possible to "remote desktop" without a desktop. That said, I have used SSH to remote control a Linux server that did not have a desktop installed at all. The same protocol could still be used on a system that does have a DE.

[Trashking]

I have SSH access, is there no way to initiate the DE?

[altair4]

As far as SSH is concerned I guess it depends on what you want to do.

For example on my Xubuntu machine I can access a Mint machine after it boots but before login:

altair@xub1404:~$ ssh -X tester1@vmint172mate.local
tester1@vmint172mate.local's password:
Welcome to Linux Mint 17.2 Rafaela (GNU/Linux 3.16.0-38-generic i686)

Welcome to Linux Mint
...
tester1@vmint172mate ~ $

I can then launch an application in the terminal that exists on Mint but doesn't exist in Xubuntu and do things graphically with that application:

tester1@vmint172mate ~ $ caja

SSH-X.png

After closing the application you can issue a "ctrl + c" to exit and finally a "exit" to disconnect from ssh.

[srs5694]

Yes, it's possible. One way is to link VNC with XDMCP. I wrote about this for Linux Magazine in 2003, and again for IBM developerWorks in 2012. I can't find the Linux Magazine article online any more, but the developerWorks piece is here. Note that the documentation is not specific to Mint (or even Ubuntu or Debian), and it's a few years old, so you may need to tweak it to get it to work. (I haven't had a need to do this recently, so I've not tried it with recent Ubuntus or Mints.) There is a comment from a reader with a configuration that worked with Ubuntu 12.04, so you might want to pay attention to that.

[Trashking]

Altair:

I can't believe I never thought of simply attempting to run the GUI for my apps from the command line. I mean I do it all the time regularly... haha, I'll try that thanks.

srs5694:

Awesome. I will look into that. I've actually stumbled upon another remote desktop solution that looks very promising: X2GO. Cross platform, [edit] open source!, and reportedly much better responsiveness than VNC, which is known to be laggy.

http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:newtox2go

To be honest, I'm surprised this is such a nuanced issue even to this day. One of the drawbacks to all the linux forks, I suppose.

[Trashking]

I'm marking this as solved. http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php

x2Go has worked like a charm for Mint KDE. Thanks everyone!