Need to get your hands on a distant Ubuntu Linux computer? Set up Ubuntu’s Screen Sharing and take remote control when you need to. You can connect to Screen Sharing with any VNC client. We’ll show you how.
Ubuntu’s Built-In “Screen Sharing” Is a VNC Server
When you make an SSH connection to a remote Ubuntu Linux computer, you get a terminal window interface. That’s perfectly fine for many tasks, such as system administration, and it has the advantage of being a lightweight connection. There are no graphics to transmit from the host computer to the local client, so it’s fast and easy to set up.
If you want to see graphical applications installed on the remote host on your local computer, you can do that with a PuTTY connection, which is also easy to set up.
But what if you want to go all-in and see the entire remote desktop and it as though you were sitting right in front of it? Simple—you use “screen sharing,” also known as desktop sharing.
To do this, you configure screen sharing on the remote computer and connect to it with a VNC client on the local computer. And—you’ve guessed it—it’s easy to set up.
Although this article concentrates on Ubuntu, this is really a GNOME thing. It works equally well on any other Linux that has a GNOME version of their distribution. Manjaro and Fedora, for example, have the same options and settings described below. We went through this process with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
How to Enable Screen Sharing on the Remote Host
These are the settings you make on the remote Ubuntu computer you’re going to connect to.
On the system menu, click the Settings icon.
