Information Security has become very important today, leading to the use of VPNs to access corporate environments. However, sometimes there is a need to access a desktop from a machine/device which may not have the necessary VPN software installed.
This situation has led to the development of thin client remote desktop software tools such as novnc, which aim to allow access to your desktop via a HTML5 enabled web browser.
One such tool is Apache Guacamole, which is essentially clientless, since the UI is accessed via any HTML5 compatible web browser. The remote desktop gateway supports many standard protocols such as VNC, RDP and SSH, allowing you to access both Linux and Windows desktops with ease.
As compared to other tools, Apache Guacamole is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0 and is an elegant member of FOSS community.
In this article, I will provide a step by step guide to help setup Guacamole to access a Linux desktop via VNC. The key idea here is to be able to stream audio from the desktop the end users browser, thereby enabling powerful multi-media enabled demos and presentations that are secure.