HowTo

Use X2GO

Prof. Bartenstein

X2Go is software that optimizes remote system connections, especially for full screen or "X" applications like full screen editors or web browsers.

X2Go works on a client/server relationship, where the server must be installed on the remote system you want to connect to, and the client must be installed on your computer, the one which will display the remote system.

Currently, servers are installed on the Computer Science "remote" hardware, and on Virtual Machine UNIX as supplied by VMware. Other systems may not have X2Go servers installed.

More information on X2Go can be found at The X2Go Wiki.

Installing the X2Go Client

See the instructions at the X2Go Getting X2Go wiki page, specifically the section on "X2Go Client". (There is an alternative to use PyHoca-GUI, but when I tried it, it just got me into trouble. My advice is to stay away from this.)

Connecting to the Computer Science Remote Server

See the X2Go X2Go Client - Usage wiki page for all the details.

When you start the X2Go client for the first time, it automatically opens the "New Session" dialog. Fill out that dialog as in the following picture:

Feel free to look at the other options and the other tabs for more advanced X2Go options, but the highlighted fields are the ones that are required.

Once you have configured a session, open it, type in your password, and if everyting is correct, X2Go will open a new terminal window that is running on the remote server, but displaying on your computer.

You may use all of the applications available on the computer science machines, including full-screen editors such as gedit or eclipse. The performance of these applications is not as good as running on a local machine, but is still surprisingly good considering all of the X-windows information that goes across the network.

When you complete your X2Go session, please log out of X2Go using the down-arrow icon. If you close the window without logging out, the host server side of your X2Go session will continue and consume resources which eventually causes problems on the Computer Science server machines.