Ubuntu® Linux® Bible

Chapter 15. Connecting to Other Systems

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Establishing secure connections

• Enabling secure connections to your machine

• Accessing remote windows and Mac OS X consoles

• Using virtual network computing

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 multicomputer households are much more sophisticated than that, often featuring home or SOHO networks of computers that share files, are often centrally administered, and to which multiple people want or need access. Although networked access to shared resources such as file servers and printers has been common in enterprise and SMB 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 in on 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 Chapter 16, "File and Transfer Sharing on Ubuntu."

Establishing Secure Connections to Other Systems

The traditional Unix application used to establish a terminal connection to a remote machine over the network is known as telnet. The telnet application connects to a telnet daemon running on a remote system and creates a login session once the proper authentication credentials have ...