At home I have a Macbook Pro that acts as my everyday desktop computer and a headless (no monitor) Ubuntu Linux server that acts as a development testbed. The Ubuntu server has Apache, MySQL and PHP installed for development. My Mac has that too, but I prefer turning those services off and let the Linux machine do the heavy lifting. Usually, it’s sufficient to log into the Linux machine through SSH and hack around with vi. However, there are times that you may want to log into the Linux GUI. That’s a pain in the arse for me, since I would have to connect a monitor and keyboard to the server. The simplest solution is to log in through X and XDMCP.
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