The Asus Eee is good for many needs, but sometimes it's nice to have access to a full desktop machine from the convenience of your Eee.  Luckily, like most Linux desktops, Eee packs thousands of hidden utilities, including some that let you connect remotely to other computers.

Accessing a Windows desktop

First, your Windows computer needs to have Remote Desktop (aka RDP, aka Terminal Services).  On XP (and maybe Vista?), you can enable it by right clicking on My Computer, going into Properties, switching to the Remote tab, and clicking the checkbox in the Remote Desktop section of the screen.

From the Asus Eee, you need to get into a terminal, by pressing CTRL-ALT-T. 

For fullscreen, type this into the terminal:

rdesktop -f 192.168.1.100

To run remote desktop in a window:

rdesktop -g 800x420 192.168.1.100

The 420 height allows enough room for the taskbar and the window handle to all fit.

Replace the IP address 192.168.1.100 with the correct one of your Windows machine.  The IP address could be on the internal network, or it could be an external Internet IP (or domain name even) if you have the correct port forwarding set up in your router (port 3389).  In this case, you could remotely access your Windows desktop anytime you have Internet access.

Of course, the best way to utilize this is to add a launcher to your desktop that will automatically launch your remote desktop without the need to open the terminal and type.  I'll show you how to do that in my next article. Suggestion if you try on your own, adding "-u myremoteusername" to the launcher will keep you from having to replace "user" each time.

Accessing a Linux Desktop

Unfortunately, accessing a Linux desktop from the Eee isn't as easy as it should be.  It doesn't ship with any VNC clients that I could find. You could install your own, but I'm trying to stick to built-in software for Eee tutorials.

My next thought was using XDMCP, a protocol that allows you to access X remotely.  Problem with that is you can't run it from within a running X session.  If you run "X -query 192.168.1.100" you get the message "Server is already active for display 0".  If we could get to a new screen running kdm, we could use kdm's built-in XDMCP.  The final nail in the coffin: the Eee doesn't ship with Xnest or gdmflexiserver (is there a kdm equivalent?) which would allow us to run XDMCP in a new screen.

However, we can get something similar.  If we ssh to our Linux desktop, we can run programs that display locally on the Eee. 

First, we need to enable remote X connections on the machine we wish to connect to.  I won't explain how to do this for every variety of Linux, as there is plenty of tutorials on the web.  I enabled remote access on Ubuntu by editing /etc/ssh/sshd_config and adding these:

X11Forwarding yes

X11DisplayOffset 10

Once that's taken care of, on the , type this into a terminal:

ssh myremoteusername@192.168.1.100 -X

The -X enables X remoting.  Once you log in, you can run commands like "gedit" or "tomboy" and they will display locally on the Eee.  Performance isn't perfect, but acceptable. One cool thing is, the apps somewhat integrate with the local desktop.  For instance, Tomboy shows its tray icon in the local tooltray on the Eee!

If you recieve an error "_X11TransSocketINETConnect() can't get address for localhost:6010:...." then type the following:

export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:10.0

Now run your app again, and you should get past the error.

I realize this doesn't allow quite the full desktop access that we get from Windows with rdesktop.  The sound doesn't run on the Eee like rdesktop does, which eliminates remote access to multimedia apps.  I'll keep looking for better solutions and post it if I find it.  But in the meantime, this will allow you to run apps that are installed on your desktop but not the Eee, without the more complicated (and slightly more risky) steps of adding software to your Eee.