X2Go

Remote connection to Department machines - X2Go

This method provides an alternative GUI connection to linux.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz rather than Remote Desktop and is preferred over it. Clients for X2Go are available from this web page for Linux, MacOS and Windows. If you find the X2Go client crashes on your Windows computer, download a slightly older version of the X2Go client.

After you've installed X2Go, go ahead and run it. If you are using Windows you'll probably be presented with a couple of dialogue boxes from the firewall, telling you it's blocked something. These will be sshd.exe and pulseaudio. Tick all the boxes in both of the windows before you click Allow access. Here's one of those windows as an example:

Then you should see a window like the one below that lets you create a new session. Set all the default options to be the same as the ones marked in red below. It's not terribly important what the session name is, so feel free to change that to something more meaningful to you if you want. You do need to set the Login field to be your own usercode and it's strongly recommended the session type at the bottom of the window is set to MATE.

One other note. The example in the image below shows use of a SSH tunnel with ssh.canterbury.ac.nz and assumes you've already setup such a connection. If you are wanting to connect directly to linux.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz, simply use this name in place of localhost, and set the SSH port to 22.

Once you've filled all of this out correctly, click OK to save the connection details.

Then, in the right side of the window, click on the name of the session you just made as indicated by the mouse in the picture below, and then login.

Click OK to begin the login. If you're using Windows you'll probably see a dialogue box requesting that VcXsrv windows xserver be allowed through the firewall. It's OK to allow this. No matter if you're using Linux, MacOS or Windows, you'll most certainly be prompted to accept the host key for linux.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz, and you should accept it in order to continue.

After a moment or two, you should be presented with a desktop session.

Further Configuration

By default the window size is 800x600 but you can change this by dragging the window to be the size you want – but you need to do this each time you connect. Conveniently you can change the default size to be something else and this is done by changing the Session preferences... as below:

The default resolution can be changed by going to the Input/Output tab and entering a custom resolution or perhaps choosing Fullscreen.

If you have a fast connection you can take advantage of this by configuring the connection type in the Connection tab and dragging the Connection speed slider towards the right. If you later find that your connection seems to run poor you may need to decrease the speed:

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