I was working on setting up for some stuff on an Ubuntu (Linux) machine in my house. The problem was that it was not my main desktop or laptop machine which means that it is sitting in a less than comfortable or optimal location.

First thought: Hey, that is Unix just SSH over to it.
(I need to use the gui for some of the software configuration on that project)
Second thought:
Remote to it with VNC (yeah, that works, but it is slow and clunky)
Third thought: Use FreeNX to connect to it
(yeah, that is a great tool but can be a pain to setup.)

I went to do a quick search (including my own blog) for the notes to setup FreeNX for Ubuntu 12.04 (12.04.1 LTS) and I noticed that in someone else notes that they had updated it to suggest using XRDP as being considerable easier to setup and that it uses the Microsoft RDP protocol so there should be clients for almost every platform (Microsoft, Linux, Mac, etc) which is great since I have a multi-OS household.

Here are the setup instructions:

Open a terminal session on the console of the Ubuntu machine in question or SSH to it and run the following command: sudo apt-get install xrdp
Then run: echo "gnome-session --session=ubuntu-2d" > ~/.xsession
Then run: sudo service xrdp restart

If you need to download the RDP client for a Apple / Mac:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads?pid=Mactopia_RDC&fid=68346E0D-44D3-4065-99BB-B664B27EE1F0#viewer

I am now able to connect to my Linux machine from any of my other machines with an RDP client. It is much faster and easier than using the VNC client/server configuration that I had previously been using.

Now I can get back to remotely configuring the software that started this side task. :-)