Graphical User Interfaces

If you just need to make simple edits to a file, or run some basic command-line applications, then simply logging into a server with the ssh command will probably suffice.

However, if you need to run an application that has a Graphical User Interface (GUI), then you'll need to use an additional tool.

There are several options (see below for a summary/description of each):

• NoMachine (fast, provides full desktop environment)
• x2Go (fast, option of full desktop environment or individual terminal)
• MobaXterm (built-in X11 server)
• PuTTY (more complicated to setup X11 server, compared to MobaXterm)

NoMachine is the recommended option because of its modern options and interface that is the same across most operating systems. The runner up is x2go, as it also uses NX for compression (so it's fast like NoMachine), but it has some more bugs on Windows, at least. Most other options such as PuTTY/MobaXterm are convenient, but they just use raw X11 protocol that is much slower.

To install the NoMachine client on your computer, see Connect using NoMachine.

To install the x2Go client, see Connect using x2Go.