Ubuntu® 8.10 Linux® Bible

Chapter BC1. Connecting to Other Systems

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Establishing secure connections to other systems

• Enabling incoming connections to your machine

• Accessing remote systems graphically

Not too long ago, networking meant either talking with groups of friends or sending e-mail and surfing the Web from your home computer. Today's multi-computer households can provide much more than that, often featuring home or SOHO (small office/home office) networks of computers that share files and peripherals (such as printers and scanners); they are often centrally administered, and provide access to multiple people who want or need it. Although networked access to shared resources such as file servers and printers has been common in enterprise and home Windows networking environments for a long time, this is now a common requirement for the modern, enlightened household.

This chapter discusses various command-line and graphical solutions provided by Ubuntu Linux for directly connecting to remote systems, either by logging on to them directly or by obtaining remote, graphical access to a desktop session. This chapter doesn't explore connecting to remote file servers and file sharing — that's discussed in Bonus Chapter 2, "File and Transfer and Sharing on Ubuntu."

Establishing Secure Connections to Other Systems

The traditional UNIX application that establishes a terminal connection (a command-line, login connection) to a remote machine over the network is known as telnet. The telnet application connects ...