Leslie Katz wrote:
I gave to the son of friends who live a considerable distance away an old laptop with Damn Small Linux installed. I installed the same distribution on another old laptop which I have, so that I could try to help him if problems arose. We have been able to solve some problems that way, but it's a slow process, with me doing things on my laptop, then emailing instructions to him.
I remember working in the past at workplaces big enough to have their own hurt desks and having my computer taken over by someone else in an ^^^^ A Freudian slip if ever i saw one! ;) attempt to solve some problem I had. That's made me wonder what the equivalent Linux software is. I wouldn't have to run that software on my DSL laptop, but could run it on my Fedora desktop, taking over the other DSL laptop over the Internet.
I'd be very grateful if someone could recommend any such software, just to get me started.
I would suggest starting with enabling an SSH server on the laptop, with access allowed only by a key, not password (half the internet will be trying to login). You can do almost everything via SSH, but if you need to run graphical programs you can either use VNC or ssh -X to display the windows on your desktop. Unlike Windows, Linux is a true multiuser operating system so you don't need to "take over" his computer to run things on it, it supports multiple users on mutiple terminals.