Ubuntu: How to share desktop for remote pair programming

How to setup the environment for remote pair programming session on Ubuntu (10.10) securely over the internet?

I think that, for our workflow, we need to share the screen, sharing terminal session or text editor alone would not be ehough. Note that I mean equal rights sharing, where both clients have full access to the keyboard and mouse.

Along with the shared screen we need to have a voice (and, maybe, text) chat working. Skype is OK.

Alexander Gladysh

Posted 2010-12-15T17:45:56.173

Reputation: 792

Answers

try teamviewer, works great through firewalls, no special setup required, free for noncommercial use, has working packages for windows, mac and linux (ubuntu).

in addition to see and takeover the remote session, you can additionally chat via text, voice or video. you can exchange files or create a vpn, all from within that application.

akira

Posted 2010-12-15T17:45:56.173

Reputation: 52 754

1Thanks for a good advice! Tried TeamViewer today. Excellent experience, almost as if we were at the same keyboard (but that must be because I know my partner well). Sound quality was horrible though, so we had to use Skype for voice chat. – Alexander Gladysh – 2010-12-16T19:01:34.127

VNC has an option where instead of a client (viewer) connecting to a server, you can put the client in listen mode and have the server initiate a connection. This way you share your connection rather than have someone connect to you.

I'm not sure all VNC versions do this but I know it was possible on Windows and I don't think it was specific to the Windows VNC client I was using.

If all else fails try x11vnc.

Broam

Posted 2010-12-15T17:45:56.173

Reputation: 3 831

i've tried mikogo and screenhero and join.me. none of them come close to plain old vnc for accessing another computer. i use a windows machine as the server and run the client (viewer) from a linux machine. vnc is much faster. with the other stuff all the traffic apparently goes through their servers which results in very slow response. the vnc server runs right on the box you want to access and the only traffic factor is the internet itself. in addition to being slow, the other stuff is just rickety in my experience. sometimes it works. more often it doesn't.

vnc enables joint control of mouse and keyboard out of the box. the version i use is tightvnc on the server and xvnc4viewer for the client on the linux box. the technology is much more mature than mikogo et al.

tom arnall

Posted 2010-12-15T17:45:56.173

Reputation: 1

2Please consider formatting your answer to improve readability. Break it down into sections, as it stands it is difficult to tell if you are actually answering the question at all. – Mokubai – 2014-09-04T06:05:35.270