X2Goserver an alternative for VNC

Finally a good alternative of VNC.
I will install and configure X2Goserver on CentOS 7.3 X2Go enables us to access a graphical desktop of a computer over a low bandwidth (or high bandwidth) connection. X2Go is a Remote Desktop solution, which some vendors vaguely call Remote Control. This technology is very similar to the technology used with Vdi (example Vmware Horizon or Citrix XenDesktop)

We can connect from a computer running Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. This computer is the X2Go Client. Multiple users/clients can access a single X2Go Server at the same time, with each user/client having an individual Desktop session by default – however, Desktop sharing (Remote Assistance) is also possible.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

This tutorial is based on CentOS 7.0 server, so you should set up a basic CentOS 7.3 server installation before you continue with this tutorial. The system should have a static IP address. I use 10.100.0.10 as my IP address in this tutorial and server1.example.com as the hostname with user root and administrator having password howtoforge for both. Additionally I will be connecting to the CentOS Server through an Ubuntu 16.14 Desktop and a Windows-10 machine. So both desktops are also required.

2 X2Goserver Installation

For this we need to ad EPEL repo, add it as follows:

rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-9.noarch.rpm

I will be installing X2Goserver in my CentOS 7.3 Server as follows:

yum -y install x2goserver-xsession

Now we need to install the graphical Desktop environment  in the CentOS Server, for that install:

yum -y groupinstall “Xfce”
reboot

After reboot we are ready for the connection.

Note: Here I am using XFCE as the desktop environment, as I checked that it doesn't support Gnome. XFCE environment is working fine with X2Go server.

Additionally we need to allow the firewall-cmd of CentOS as follows:

firewall-cmd –permanent –zone=public –add-service=ssh
firewall-cmd –reload

3 X2Go connection with Ubuntu Desktop

Now we are going to connect with the CentOS 7.0 server with the X2Goclient from my Ubuntu 16.10 desktop. We will install the X2Goclient in the Ubuntu Desktop as follows:

sudo apt-get install x2goclient

It will install the X2Goclient in my machine, if you are using any distribution older than Ubuntu 12.04 then you need to add the repository of X2Go as follows:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:x2go/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install x2goclient

3.1 X2Go connection with Windows 10

Now we are going to connect with the CentOS 7.0 server with the X2Goclient from my  Windows 10 desktop. We will install the X2Goclient in the Windows 10 as follows:

  • Download the software : http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:x2goclient
  • Install the software

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