Remote Linux desktop on your VPS with SSH and VNC

While you usually connect to your VPS via a terminal, you can also connect to a remote Linux desktop via SSH or VNC to run desktop GUI apps.
There are a number of ways to get this done, from running single commands via X11 forwarding and
ssh
, to forwarding an entire desktop, to using VNC. In this tutorial, we’ll cover how to do each of these so that you can choose the application that works best for your needs.
Note: We can’t guarantee these operations will be particularly fast—primarily due to latency between your machine and your VPS—but it could come in handy every once in awhile.
Prerequisites
- A VPS running any of our available OS options.
- A non-root user account (commands requiring escalated privileges will use
sudo
). - A local machine running Linux, an OS X machine with XQuartz installed, or a Windows machine with Xming installed—this tutorial depends on having some type of X server running locally.
Forwarding single X applications
To forward a remote Linux desktop running on your VPS, which allows you to view X applications on your local machine, you should connect viassh
using the -X
option, which enables X forwarding, and the -C
option, which enables data compression.
$ ssh -XC [email protected]
Once into the VPS, you should first install the xauth
package.
$ sudo apt install xauth # Debian/Ubuntu
$ sudo yum install xorg-x11-xauth # CentOS
Then, open /etc/ssh/sshd_config
with your favorite editor and look for the X11Forwarding
option. This line should be uncommented and be changed to X11Forwarding yes
.
After that, you should restart.... Read More
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