remoting protocols

I've been playing with / using x2go more lately and I sure do like it. I originally learned about it by reading the Fedora 20 ChangeSet and saw that it will be a new feature in the upcoming Fedora 20. I started using Fedora 20 shortly before the alpha release came out. Fedora 20 Beta was released on 2013-11-12... and I've been building my MontanaLinux remix about once a week. Anyway, I'm getting off track. Back to x2go.

I figured out how to make sound work. This FAQ entry did the trick for me.

I have used the x2godesktopsharing applet to connect to an existing X11 session and that works great too.

x2go has been making quite a bit of progress especially on Fedora / EL systems thanks to volunteer packager orionp (orionp on #x2go on the FreeNode IRC network). orionp is not only responsible for the Fedora 20 packages, but has also built them for Fedora 19 (currently in updates-testing) and EPEL6. I've been connecting to a number of different systems (physical, virtual KVM and OpenVZ containers) testing it all out. Who knew that an OpenVZ container could be a pretty good desktop system complete with sound? Sound does use a bit of network bandwidth so it is only appropriate for LAN and really fast WAN connections.

I've tried several desktop environments and in general, they work well. Some seem to tolerate multiple users more than others. For example, I don't think KDE handles sound for multiple users very well, whereas with XFCE it seems to work fine. x2go seems to outperform SPICE from my anecdotal experiences thus far. Multimedia works quite well except when I go beyond 1920x1080.

I still haven't tried x2go folder sharing (which uses sshfs which has always worked well for me), USB device access, nor printing. I haven't needed those features yet. The Microsoft Windows x2goclient works well.

There are a few bugs that orionp will be fixing ASAP. I reported this bug for the EPEL packages. Luckily there are easy work-arounds until the updates are done. I've learned a little about x2go troubleshooting as a result.

I also got a chance to install my Fedora 20 remix on a remote machine over x2godesktopsharing. I had to manually boot the target machine from LiveUSB which automatically logs in as user "liveuser". I enabled sshd, set a password for liveuser, enabled x2gocleansessions, ran x2godesktopsharing, enabled sharing... and then connected from my workstation and did the install. It went well. Thanks x2go developers!

Update: (25 NOV 2013) The x2go packages in Fedora 19 have been moved from the testing repo into updates. An updated x2goserver package has been submitted to the EPEL6-testing repo. I'll test it ASAP and if good, give it some karma.