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Simple KDE Trick #2: using remote desktops with avahi, krfb and krdc

Most peo­ple nowa­days have more than one com­put­er. Of­ten, you are us­ing one, and would like to do some­thing in an­oth­er. In this video, I will ex­plain how triv­ial it is to do that with­out leav­ing your seat in a mod­ern Lin­ux us­ing KDE.

We will use the fol­low­ing:

  • Avahi, a ze­ro­­conf im­­ple­­men­­ta­­tion to let you find your com­put­ers in your net­­work with­­out wor­ry­ing about IP ad­­dress­es, DNS, etc.

  • kr­f­b, the KDE Re­­mote Frame Buf­fer. This is a pro­­gram to share your desk­­top over the net­­work.

  • krd­c, the KDE Re­­mote Desk­­top Clien­t, a VNC, RDP clien­t, which is what you use to see a desk­­top shared via kr­f­b.

I am sure users of oth­er op­er­at­ing sys­tems or desk­top en­vi­ron­ments will say they can do it just as eas­i­ly. In that case, feel free to do your own videos ;-)

Keep in mind that ac­cess­ing re­mote desk­tops over the in­ter­net is a whole dif­fer­ent beast, and this so­lu­tion is not meant for that case.

As usu­al, this video was record­ed us­ing qt-record­my­desk­top. There was mi­nor edit­ing us­ing men­coder.

The com­put­er used is the orig­i­nal Asus eee PC 701 4G, so you can see this is not ex­act­ly a hard­ware-in­ten­sive op­er­a­tion. I find the eee's small screen is great for this kind of ful­l-screen de­mo, be­cause it's not big enough to drown the im­por­tant part­s.

ungethym / 2009-10-21 11:56:

Excellent! Thanks for your work.

ungethym / 2009-10-21 11:56:

Excellent! Thanks for your work.

lefty.crupps / 2009-10-21 13:44:

Nice video there! I learned something new aout Avahi and about ways to connect with Krdc.

I may write this up a bit on my own blog, with the example being for KDE4 on Debian Testing; I'll be sure to link back to you :)

lefty.crupps / 2009-10-21 13:44:

Nice video there! I learned something new aout Avahi and about ways to connect with Krdc.

I may write this up a bit on my own blog, with the example being for KDE4 on Debian Testing; I'll be sure to link back to you :)

Roberto Alsina / 2009-10-21 13:49:

@lefty: by all means expand :-)

Roberto Alsina / 2009-10-21 13:49:

@lefty: by all means expand :-)


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