customising life

I think it’s just a little sad that I would even want to attempt this, but here goes.

EDIT: This was for Xubuntu Dapper (6.06), as far as I can tell using pptpconfig (the GUI) will not work to setup and connect to a VPN on Xubuntu Edgy (6.10).

Installing the network-manager applet will.

In very ‘rare’ cases I often connect to my work’s VPN and then connect to my work PC’s using the Windows Remote Desktop function. It’s pretty straightfoward to set up from Windows, but I wanted to do it from Xubuntu, seeing as I seldom ever use Windows these days.

I tried to do this a while ago and had absolutely no luck. Fortunes was smiling on me this time, as it was almost as easy to set things up in Xubuntu as it was Windows.

As it turns out, PPTP support is, and has been for almost a year, part of the Linux kernel. The neccessary PPTP client package is available from the main Ubuntu repository, which is always nice. You could go right ahead and install and configure the PPTP connection using the command line, but I wussed out and installed a GUI for PPTP.

You can grab it by editing your sources.list to include the following repository

# James Cameron’s PPTP GUI
deb http://quozl.netrek.org/pptp/pptpconfig ./

Then you can install the PPTP client and the GUI with,

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pptp-linux pptpconfig

Then finally you can run the GUI (as root) with

gksudo pptpconfig &

I used gksudo and ‘&’ so that the process is started without being bound (for lack of a better word) to the terminal it is started from. Alternatively use Alt-F2.

To set up the connection, you will need the IP address of the VPN, and a username and password for connecting. Just enter in the information and click Add.

It also helps to ensure that the user is allowed to make incoming connections to the VPN; this had me scratching my head for days (this before even considering using Xubuntu)

If all goes well you should be able to connect to the server and ping it.

Looking good.

There are other options that you may need; encryption or tunnels, if you want certain traffice to go through certain routes. More than I think I need for this stage, but more detailed instructions are easily found.

So all went according to plan, next step is to remote desktop to my work PC.