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So, I’ve searched for literally hours on this subject. Seen various solutions. But practically all of them are for people who want to see their Ubuntu desktop on their Mac, with both machines on the local network.

I want to log into an Ubuntu server that lives across the continent. I can easily log in over SSH, and I managed to get X11 configured such that I can SSH in, run sudo synaptic, and get the Synaptic window to come up on my machine to manage packages.

However, what I would really love is to be able to log in to the remote machine and see the desktop as if I were physically standing there.

Remote machine is running Ubuntu 10.4, I’m on OS X 10.6.8. I have admin rights on both machines. I also updated the bundled X11 on OS X to the latest version of XQuartz.

Anyone know if (and how) this is possible?

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You can do it easily using ssh port forwarding. Open terminal and enter

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 remote_ip

with any other applicable settings you need. This will forward port 5900 on your local machine to port 5900 on the remote machine. If you need to change to a different local port (say, if you're already running a VNC server on your local machine), change the first 5900 to something else.

Then once the ssh connection is running, just VNC to localhost:5900, and you should get a connection to your remote machine.

If you don't have a VNC client already, there's one built in to Mac OS X. Open Finder, press ⌘K and enter vnc://localhost:5900 as shown below, and hit connect.

Finder Conect to Server Dialog

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  • Oh, hardcore… I can’t wait to try this out! ☺
    – Zearin
    Sep 6, 2011 at 12:33
  • this was quite useful for me.. and it worked..although for the remote ip i had to use in the remoteuser@remoteip format for it to work .. RMMV
    – marc-andre benoit
    May 23, 2012 at 0:38
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    And if you're already running a VNC server on your mac (Screen Sharing for example), you can use a different local post with: ssh -L 5901:localhost:5900 username@remote_ip and then use vnc://localhost:5901. The 5901 port can be any unused port between 1024-65535 (or from 1-65535 if you're root)
    – Josh
    Apr 5, 2015 at 15:37

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