Using Apple X11 to access CDE/GNOME/KDE/etc. on a remote machine

I've been playing around with solaris servers in the office this last week and came up against a problem when I wanted to access one of our machines remotely. I installed Apple X11 onto my machine (see earlier posts) and was found myself with an Xterminal command line and the question: How do access my remote machine? I know nothing about Xterminals so the following info. maybe ovbious to a frequesnt *nix user but I didn't know what to do. After much digging on the internet I found the answer.

1)Open X11.app (in Applications/Utilities)
2) In the Xterminal command window that appears, type the following:

Xnest :1 -query (hostname/ip address)

So, for example:

Xnest :1 -query 192.168.0.37

i'm sure there are other ways of doing this that give you more options but this should definately get you started if you're having trouble getting it to work.

If you want to set up a shortcut to this command, go to 'Applications' in the X11 app and choose 'Customize...'. From here, you can add the command line to open any X11 application. A word of advice though, if your remote connection isn't working properly, open up an Xterm window and type the command direct into there rather than using an application shortcut. this is because when you run Xcommand from the Xterminal command line, the terminal command line window acts as a log so you can determine where your X11 is experiencing problems.

Remote Desktop Connection for Macs

today I discovered a cool tool available from Microsoft. As 'The only Mac in the village' it is important that I can interact with Windows users and wondered if there was any way of me being bale to make a remote desktop connection to a Windows machine without going through Parallels (which, as cool as it is, does put a strain on system resources). I found that I can using a piece of software that is free on Microsoft's 'Mactopia' site:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts/otherproducts.aspx?pid=remotedesktopclient

In 5 minutes, I was able to be maintaining the Windows server on the other side of the room. The only downside is that the colours are in a low resolution but it doesn't matter if it allows you the ability to make some important config change remotely.

Hats off to Microsoft on this one!