X windowing system remote desktop procedure? (No VNC, no XN)

Question

I want to display the desktop of my raspberry pi on my laptop. On the rPI runs Raspbian with LXDE. I am on Ubuntu 12.04/awesome. Is it possible to display the complete rPi-desktop on my laptops Xserver?

I dont want to see just windows with the ssh -X ... way. I want to have the complete desktop.

As I read VNC sends just picture over the net. And what exactly NX does, i did not understand really :D. Some compression on top of X11...

What is the real raw X windowing system remote desktop procedure?

Answer 1

The "raw" version of connecting to a remote server and run X11 applications would be configuring XCDMCP on the rPi and the connecting to it from your Laptop with something like this:

X -query <ip>

This setup works fine in a LAN, but if you need a connection over the Internet, configuring something like NX is much better, it gives you less latency and an encrypted connection by default.

Answer 2

Well first create a new nested Xserver:

user@host $ Xephyr :1 -screen 800x600 &

A window called "Xephyr on :1" should spawn. Ssh into the remote host an forward the display to the created display:

user@host $ DISPLAY=:1 ssh -Y username@remotehost

Now start a session on the remotehost, in my case LXDE:

user@remotehost $ lxsession

You should now see the desktop in Xephyr.

Otherwise a second xServer could be created.

hf