Need to help out a damsel in distress (username “damsel”) sitting on a remote debian/ubuntu box (“remotehost”)? Have you set up ssh on a non-standard port (port 12345) already? Great. Keep reading.

Step 1: Install x11vnc on the remote machine:

ssh remotehost
sudo apt-get install x11vnc

Step 2: Spin up x11vnc on the remote host:

ssh remotehost
sudo -u damsel x11vnc -noxdamage -speeds dsl -solid -display :0 -passwd SECRET

Keep this ssh running. -speeds dsl -solid makes vnc more responsive.

Step 3: Forward the remotehost’s vnc port, 5900, to your local host using ssh:

ssh -p 12345 -L 5900:127.0.0.1:5900 remotehost

Step 4: Start up your VNC viewer application, pointing to localhost.

Tightvnc is a great vncviewer and is installable through macports:

sudo port install tightvnc

Then run:

vncviewer localhost

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