My experiences with the Red Hat's GUI through VNC on a Linode 64 have been just fine. Even with all their applets and candy and a few browser instances running everything ran well.

Anything will run regardless of how much physical RAM you have if you have enough swap space, but I didn't notice any swapping. Of course, there wasn't anything else big running on my Linode at the time (like a big database or something).

I can't really speak towards Red Hat's minimum standards strategy – perhaps they know machines with more RAM aren't going to be old unsupported hardware that would cause their support team trauma?

-Chris

Thanks Chris -

Is there a guide anywhere explaining how to go about accessing my Linode (just installed RedHat9 Large) with VNC, or a similar viewer? From there I should be fine.

Quik

There's some information inside the Members section, on the "SSH, Remote Console and Desktop" page. Nothing is specific to Linode, but generally:

Log in as a "normal" user.

type "vncserver" – first time it'll ask you for a password

Then, on your local PC launch VNCViewer and connect to ":1". The ":1" means the first display on the box. You can run multiple VNC sessions, each one will get it's own display number.

-Chris

Thanks Chris - I missed that part of the control panel down the bottom :)

Continuing the theme of GUI's, I'd be grateful if anyone has any ideas on the following-

I've got an installation of RedHat9 large at the moment as its the only one I've found that I can use something like VNC with. Are there any other distros that have VNC equivalents with them, or that are easily installed?

Also, on this RH9 install I have been removing packages trying to get back some precious disk space, but when I choose any package to remove I always get this message:

~~http://www.mdkclan.co.uk/packages.gif" />

Any ideas?

Thanks folks :)~~

Quik -

I have the small Debian image on my Linode and have vncserver running without any problems. I'm guessing that you're somewhat new to Linux, so I wouldn't recommend it as it requires a little futzing, and I only set it up to run ctwm (Claude's Tab Window Manager), which is nothing like KDE or Gnome (and probably dates me). There's no reason that kde or gnome shouldn't work though: I just wanted something really lightweight for when I use vnc over a dialup.

If you or anyone else would like to give it a shot, all you should need to do is:

apt-get install vncserver vnc-common xbase-clients xfonts-100dpi xfonts-75dpi xfonts-base xfonts-scalable xfree86-common xfs xfstt xlibs xserver-common xutils ctwm

You can probably change ctwm to kde and get a "modern" window manager working without much additional effort.

-"Zow"

Thanks again zow - I'll have a go when I next do a fresh start.