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I am a Computer Science undergraduate student. I have a self-built desktop with more than enough CPU time and Memory to share. I use this for daily computing, coding, and other homework.

I also have a circa early 2000's dell laptop with an old intel celeron and 512MB of RAM. (My cell phone is more powerful than this thing)

The idea is that I want to be able to use my desktop as a "Server" for the laptop and only use the laptop almost as a remote control of sorts for the desktop.

I have used VNC in the past to achieve this kind of capability but was always very slow over the network and cumbersome to use.

What I would like would be an efficient way to either access the host OS from the laptop or give it some way to use the host's resources to drive its OS hosted as virtual machine or something.

Does anyone know of a creative solution or software that does something like this?

Mokubai
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Brandon Kreisel
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4 Answers4

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VNC is a bit of a brute force approach to doing remote desktop - the generic implementation simply sends you the image on the screen at the moment, and your system just displays that. Its why its so darned portable but sucks for most part.

I've personally have had great luck with chrome remote as a remote desktop client - its dead simple, and has crazy good performance over WAN. Turn off aero, and other than sound, its nearly native, with almost no connection configuration. You would however find that if the client has a lower res than the host, the image quality/scaling isn't aways very good, and this is made worse if you end up needing to letter box.

If the server is a linux box, i've had good luck with freenx/nx versions, though development on freenx seems to have stagnated. Its probably the fastest remote desktop I've used so far, up until chrome remote. You can use the official client from nomachine with any of the common in distro varients that are available. The enterprise client contains only the client, while the regular package contains both a client and server.

With RDP, you may need to get a suitable client (there's newer clients for say windows XP that supports the new shiny vista and 7 RDP stuff), and with newer versions of windows, rather counter intuitively leaving graphical speedup related stuff on is good. Its also faster than RDP since it sends instructions on rendering, rather than bitmaps of the screen.

And of course, there's always the option not to export the gui, and do everything over ssh or mosh - which would mean almost no overhead, and looking really cool ;p.

Journeyman Geek
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You can use:

  • The pair MoonLight / Sunshine originaly built for gamers, but many users use it as a high performance remote desktop client:
    • Moonlight (formerly Limelight) is an open source implementation of NVIDIA's GameStream protocol
    • Sunshine is a self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight. Offering low latency, cloud gaming server capabilities with support for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia GPUs for hardware encoding. Software encoding is also available. You can connect to Sunshine from any Moonlight client on a variety of devices. A web UI is provided to allow configuration, and client pairing, from your favorite web browser. Pair from the local server or any mobile device.
  • Xrdp is a complete open source remote desktop protocol server solution that you can easily deploy to Linux servers

The first one is better to have very low lag, the second one enables several user sessions on the same workstation. You probably can install both and use which one fits best your needs at a given time. Eventually, I assume it is possible to have multiple users with Sunshine but I have not found proper information yet.

lalebarde
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You have used VNC before. Which VNC?

UltraVNC?

RealVNC?

TurboVNC? (set up properly with the VirtualGL drivers, you can GAME with this)

TightVNC?

Chicken of the VNC?

Something I didn't list?

You can speed up most usage of VNC by reducing the Desktop colors transmitted (use 256 colors for example, and the data being squirted to you from the server is much smaller than say... 64k colors... and you can do that at the client!). The size of the desktop as well can affect the refresh speed (can be hard coded at the server, to where I know one university that offers different desktop resolutions depending on the port you connect to). Then there is your actual connection speed that could be the bottleneck.

UltraVNC offers faster connection speed options than most other VNC installations. TurboVNC combined with VirtualGL... well, as I mention... you can game by remote... meaning you could have a high end game running on the server, and be playing it on a machine that doesn't meet the game's requirements.

So, just saying you've tried VNC doesn't actually cover issues you may have had. VNC is also cross platform, so you don't face some of the issues you might with Microsoft's RDP... where you need to have specific versions of Windows just to be able to accept incoming connections.

What you are doing is already the right way to go. You just need to tweak the settings you are using to optimize the connection.

EDIT I forgot about Jolly's Fast VNC. Oh... and did you know that the remote desktop system built into MacOSX is a version of VNC? And... the same for Linux. It's a variant of VNC.

Bon Gart
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Select any linux variant you are comfortable on the server and create accounts on it for both of you.

Then on the laptop install a lightweight linux and let it connect to the server (preferably with X-forwarding over ssh)

Community
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Nifle
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