Xpra is known as "screen for X" : its seamless mode allows you to run X11 programs,
usually on a remote host, direct their display to your local machine,
and then to disconnect from these programs and reconnect from the same or another machine(s),
without losing any state.
Effectively giving you remote access to individual graphical applications.
It can do a lot more than that too:
accessing existing desktop sessions and starting remote desktop sessions,
and many network protocols.
Xpra is open-source (GPLv2+) with clients available for many supported platforms
and the server includes a built-in HTML5 client.
Xpra is usable over a variety of network protocols and does its best to adapt to any network conditions.
Xpra forwards and synchronizes many extra desktop features which allows remote applications to integrate transparently into the client's desktop environment: audio input and output, printers, clipboard, system trays, notifications, webcams, etc
It can also open documents and URLs remotely, display high bit depth content and it will try honour the display's DPI.
Xpra servers can support many different types of connections using a single TCP port:
SSL, SSH, (secure) http / websockets, RFB, etc..
Connections can be secured using encryption and many authentication modules.
Sessions can be automatically announced on LANs using multicast DNS
so that clients can connect more easily using a GUI (ie: xpra mdns-gui
).
Its flexible proxy server can be used as a relay or front end for multiple server sessions.
Either download the official packages or install from source (usually just python3 ./setup.py install
).
Then you can just run:
xpra start ssh://USER@HOST/ --start=xterm
To start xterm
on HOST
and display it locally (xterm
must be installed on HOST
).
For more examples, see usage.