Chapter 14.
Handling GUI Access with X and VNC Servers
href="http:// /?xmlid=0-201-77423-2/ch13#ch13"> Chapter 13 covered
remote text-based login servers ( rlogind , Telnet, and SSH). These servers,
in conjunction with appropriate client programs on other computers, allow users
to log in and run text-based programs on a Linux computer. Because Linux (and
UNIX more generally) supports a wide range of text-based tools, such text-based
remote access servers allow users to perform most types of tasks with Linux. Many
users, though, are most comfortable with a graphical user interface (GUI) for
running programs. By themselves, text-based login servers don't support full
GUIs, so users can't run popular GUI programs like The GIMP, Netscape
Navigator, or StarOffice. (A few programs, like Emacs, support both GUI and
text-based operation.) In order to provide access to GUI tools, you need to run
special GUI servers. The most common of these in Linux is the X Window System
(or X for short), which is Linux's native GUI environment. X is inherently
network-capable, so you only need appropriate X software on the remote system. In
some cases, you can use text-based login tools as part of the process, but in
other cases you may want to run a special X-based login tool. Another option is
to use a package called Virtual Network Computing
(VNC), which provides network GUI access similar to that of X, but using
different protocols. This chapter covers all of these options.