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For my education we have to run certain software that's installed on a virtual machine that we run on our laptop. My laptop (Macbook) can't run the virtual environment that well, and I was wondering if I could build a seperate computer (running ubuntu/elementary) at home, that I could control with my laptop as if it were a virtual machine.

If it's possible, does that mean I can run heavy processes on the Linux computer at home, without my Macbook getting extremely slow and crashing?

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If you are going to be building a "powerhouse" of a computer at home which runs ubuntu/elementaryOS on it I would recommend using ssh to connect to your machine. You can set it up by forwarding a few ports on your home or dorm router and access it from the command line using the ssh command. You may want to call your ISP and get a static IP adress to make sure you don't have to keep up with what your IP adress is at your home/dorm. Here is an example: ssh username@ipOrURL:portNumber. If you have a password set on the machine you will have to enter your password and you should be in. EDIT:This will only be a command line interface, read below if you need gui applications.

If you need to use GUI applications you have to install a XServer. You can use XQuartz(https://www.xquartz.org/). To use the GUI you just need to add a -X parameter to the command.

Once you get this set up you can set up a quick "batch file"(or whatever the equivalent is in macOS) to connect to your machine quickly.

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  • I'm going to look into the possibilities of doing this, thanks!
    – JillevdW
    Commented Sep 14, 2016 at 15:37
  • @DavidKing If you are not comfortable with network set ups you can probably talk to your school IT guy and ask for help. I think they will more than happily help you.
    – utkumaden
    Commented Sep 14, 2016 at 18:31
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There are a variety of remote access solutions you could use to accomplish that. Solutions such as RDP or VNC are very common; Virtualbox and perhaps VMware allow RDP-like connections to VMs if a setting is enabled. You may also have to modify your home networking to allow this.

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Of course you can build your own system and remotely control it. TeamViewer is a good free cross-platform remote access client. The client side (your laptop) will not have to process nearly as much if it is only receiving the video signal and handling inputs (mouse/keyboard).

You could also check out some developing services that give you your own cloud computer.

LiquidSky: https://liquidsky.tv/ (Cloud based windows PC which you could then install a virtual machine on)

LeapComputing is another one: http://leapcomputing.com/Consumer/index.html (Coming soon)

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