There are a wide range of remote desktop applications that are available that can be used to connect to Windows environment but there aren’t too many that can be used to remote desktop from Linux to Linux or Windows to Linux.

"PARIS, France -- Tuesday, September 22, 2009 -- In a landmark ruling that will set legal precedent, the Paris Court of Appeals decided last week that the company Edu4 violated the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) when it distributed binary copies of the remote desktop access software VNC but denied users access to its corresponding source code.

A friend of mine (who’s a recent Linux convert), needed help with some tweaking of his Ubuntu based PC. He phoned me this morning, but it became evident that I actually had to “see” the system. I suggested a remote connection.

I was discussing VNC this afternoon with some students and the question came up on how to secure VNC. As you may have noticed most network protocols do not have much for built in security. Many rely on other programs for their network security needs, such as ssh. This is also the case with VNC.