I’m sure most Linux sys admins are familair with screen – it’s a virtual terminal multiplexer that allows single logins to be ‘detached’, then resumed later. This is fantastic because it means what you’re doing can survive connection failures, you can share it with other users, etc.
Windows has a similar tool called ‘Remote Desktop’, which runs on the RDP standard.
I would *LOVE* to have the same functionality available in Linux: be able to remote into an X session, picking up its last state (presuming that user had already been logged-in), or to be able to launch a new session, then disconnect later, and pick it up again whenever I want to in the future.
I have no idea how hard that may be to implement, but it would rock.
KDE includes this by default. You can turn it on in the preferences dialog. Internally it uses VNC to share the main screen.
You can also do it by embedding VNC into X somehow. I’ve heard about how it’s done but have no first hand information. Google can probably find it for you, though.
Why not VNC? It can be a bit of a pain over the public Internet, but it’s not too bad, and you can easily tunnel it over ssh. I like tightVNC. I can access my Ubuntu desktop from a windows machine if need be. This has come in really handy in presentation settings where there’s a windows desktop already at the podium. I can have my laptop sitting to one side and I don’t have to figure out if my laptop will play nice with their projector, etc. etc. I just VNC into my laptop from the windows machine. 🙂
I have used VNC in the past, but it’s always seemed sluggish, especially when compared to RDP on Windows.
http://www.the-love-shack.net/2008/01/23/xmove-xvfb-coolness/
http://serverfault.com/questions/73091/linux-to-linux-remote-desktop