To use one of my servers as a development platform I have choosen VNC through a SSH tunnel to access a graphical user interface. The GUI is necessary in order to play around with eclipse and android development and VNC is used as it should reduce the network traffic to its bare minimum keeping my slow internet connection available for other services as well.
I will start with vnc4server as it seems to be available in the standard debian repos, so a:
aptitude install vnc4server
should do the trick. To get a display to connect to the next step is:
vnc4server -geometry 1024x768 -depth 24
which will create the display with the specified geometry. You will be prompted for a password afterwards which will be used for the remote connection. To get the new server running just type:
vnc4server
and thats it. The server will be stopped by:
vnc4server -kill :1
The corresponding viewer part will be installed by:
aptitude install xvnc4viewer
and you will be able to access the server by issuing:
xvnc4viewer
To have a graphical UI available I start with xfce on the remote machine in the first step to see if it suffices.
On the server side the desktop will be started by including the following command in /etc/vnc/xstartup:
startxfce4
whereas on the client side you should issue the following commend once you are connected to the server through a vnc client viewer:
xfdesktop