remote desktopremote-assistance
Possible Duplicate:
Remote Desktop similar to Teamviewer?
I'm used to being able to help my parents through iChat screen sharing on OS X and Remote Assistance on Windows. Is there something that has the same workflow (no setup, works through NATs and firewalls) available for Ubuntu? I'd be very nervous about migrating them to Ubuntu without the ability to help them remotely.
If you're planning on providing assistance to someone who is not very computer savvy, TeamViewer is going to make your life far easier. Yes, it is a closed-source commercial product – but the magical sensation you feel when establishing a connection using only an ID number makes it all well worth it.
For a while you might think you can pull off carefully setting up a VNC server and the required firewall/NAT rules to be ready for future support sessions, but it won't do you any good the day that your friend in need of assistance has changed their network setup or broken their server configuration by following some Hoary Hedgehog how-to.
It's pretty hard to get this part wrong:
With most of my clients, I don't even have them try to install TeamViewer. Session initiation looks like this:
In general, xrdp will do what you want. And is compatible with many RDP clients out there.
The drawback is that Unity, the default WM in Ubuntu, no longer supports it. I believe, although I've never tried it, that it works with GNOME.
For my personal use, I just installed MATE desktop (as it has less "flair" then GNOME) and configured Ubuntu to use that whenever remotely logging in.
See here for information on setting it up (This answer uses XFCE for remote-desktop. You may choose something else):
Best Answer
Ubuntu has been shipping Empathy for a few releases. It uses the Telepathy framework, which does all the heavy lifting. All you need to do is set up your parents to use gtalk (or some other jabber service) in the chat application, and then when they want to ask you for help, they right click on your name in the name list, and select Share my desktop. My answer to this question has more information.
Here is some information on the feature