Remote Access in KDE

I have been looking for a way to login to my other PCs which have no monitors, and for the most part SSH works fine, but lately I have found myself wanting to create more of a testing environment setup without using a Virual Machine. Enter ‘Remote Connection using XDMCP’.

There are a few things you have to do to the machine you wish to login to first before you can use this nice feature. First of all you need to modify the /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc file and set make sure you have the following:
[code]
[Xdmcp]
# Whether KDM should listen to incoming XDMCP requests.
# Default is true
Enable=true
# The UDP port on which KDM should listen for XDMCP requests. Do not change.
# Default is 177
Port=177
# File with the private keys of X-terminals. Required for XDM authentication.
# Default is “”
KeyFile=/etc/kde3/kdm/kdmkeys
# XDMCP access control file in the usual XDM-Xaccess format.
# Default is “/etc/kde3/kdm/Xaccess”
Xaccess=/etc/kde3/kdm/Xaccess
# Number of seconds to wait for display to respond after the user has
# selected a host from the chooser.
# Default is 15
#ChoiceTimeout=10
# Strip domain name from remote display names if it is equal to the local
# domain.
# Default is true
#RemoveDomainname=false
# Use the numeric IP address of the incoming connection on multihomed hosts
# instead of the host name.
# Default is false
#SourceAddress=true
# The program which is invoked to dynamically generate replies to XDMCP
# DirectQuery or BroadcastQuery requests.
# If empty, no program is invoked and “Willing to manage” is sent.
# Default is “”
Willing=/etc/kde3/kdm/Xwilling
[/code]

Next you need to modify the /etc/kde3/kdm/Xaccess file. For ease of use, I made it so any host (’*') can connect and the CHOOSER BROADCAST was set to ‘*’.

Once you have that finished, you then must restart KDM. From the command line or the TTY login, run “sudo /etc/init.d/kdm restart”.

Now you can login to the remote machine using XDMCP. Enjoy!