Q I have a home LAN of five PCs, one of which is set up without mouse, keyboard or monitor but has the TV-Out port connected via S-Video cable to an analogue TV. This PC has a digital HDTV card, and I have configured xorg.conf to clone the video card output to the TV. Everything works fine if I attach a mouse and keyboard because I can use the TV output instead of a monitor. Currently I can remotely access this PC using NX (preferable) or TightVNC, but I cannot figure out how to remotely access Desktop:0, which is the desktop being output to the TV. I have tried Google, but nothing that I have found seems to resolve this problem. I guess that an alternative solution may be to somehow set up xorg.conf to output Desktop:1 to the TV. I am currently running Kubuntu 6.10.
A VNC is intended to work like this, to run as a separate X session, although it is possible to change it. By running X11vnc, housed at www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc, you can make your existing X display available via VNC. But because you are using Kubuntu, and therefore the KDE desktop, the answer is simpler: use the Rdesktop server and client contained in KDE. On the headless PC, start the KDE Control Centre and go to the Internet & Network > Desktop Sharing section. Next, turn Allow Uninvited Connections on and Confirm Uninvited Connections off. You must set a password to stop unauthorised connections. Blocking port 5900 at your router is also a good idea, unless you want to be able to connect from the internet. Now you can connect with K-Menu > Internet > Krdc Remote Desktop Connection on another computer. The alternative is to connect to the box with SSH and run individual X programs on your local desktop, thus:
ssh -X hostname someprogram
This solution has the possible advantage of the computer program not appearing on the TV display, which is useful if you want to carry out some administrative task while viewing video output to the TV. Although some films may arguably be improved by the presence of a Konsole window opened on top of them, it is unlikely that family members watching the TV will agree with that. Setting X.org to put display 1 on the card won't help, as the standard VNC server will then start up on display 0.