Remote desktop and file sharing between OS X and Linux (Ubuntu is the one I’m using). They should just work, right? Well, sort of. I tried various implementations of VNC for remote desktop. They are all slow. Keyboard doesn’t quite work because Gnome’s keyboard mapping is currently broken in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. As for file sharing, I tried both Samba and NFS. The former requires quite some set up and is not very stable between OS X and Ubuntu. The latter requires the UID on both systems to be the same. I was not happy with any of these solutions. So I didn’t a little more research and ultimately settled down on the following two pieces of software:
- FreeNX for remote desktop. It’s free and easy to install. You can get the OS X client from NoMachine. The speed of it just blows any VNC implementation and even Windows Remote Desktop away. I’m using it with a 54M connection and 1920 by 1200 resolution. It feels as if I’m using a local machine.
- Netatalk for file sharing. It’s just a open source implementation of the AppleTalk Protocol Suite. Because of that, OS X can connect to a Netatalk server very naturally. The speed is also very fast.
Both of these two servers can be installed from the Ubuntu repository. You just use the afp protocol to connect to Netatalk. As I mentioned above, the NX client can be downloaded from NoMachine.
