Most of the linux admins love the command console for their remote work. You can use Putty to login remotely to your server. But if you want to have the graphical user interface at your disposal, use vnc server.

yes. PuTTY is available as a small windows client (1 small .exe file). You can use this for encrypted command line access to your server.

VNC on the other hand is more like remote desktop, but considering most servers wont have a GUI anyway then putty is generally what is used. There is a windows client available.

Thanks heaps folks!

I have tried putty and had some success, which is a major step forward ...

Does anyone know if there is a VNC client that will run on a Windows box and give me access to the GUI (assuming there is one) of the Linux server.

Here is the link to the VNC website. You can download the VNC server for your linux box and VNC client for your windows box.

For determining a distro there are generally a few things you can do from the command line.

# uname -a
It'll tell the kernel image, which can sometimes be matched online. (EL signifies RHEL kernels, for instance)

There is generally a release file in /etc/. I believe it is /etc/release.txt or something similar for Red Hat. SuSE also has one, but alas I forget the name at this point in time. Contained within will be the release version or version and in SuSE's case a minor version.

For GUI, if a GUI is even installed (find / -name 'X'), I strongly recommend NX. There are NX server and client RPMs available and a Windows client - all free. It is encrypted, spawns a new session and is more responsive than VNC (from my experience).

if I were you, I'd install webmin on the server, instead of trying to log into GUI. Much more secure and very convenient. You can d/l it for almost any distro out there

by the way if its a debian or ubuntu based server (as opposed to a redhat one), you can use a command called apt to install the ssh server or VNC server.

on a debian system just do:

apt-get update

apt-get install (packagename)

Itt will download, install and configure it all for you as well as any dependencies.

Webmin is good but I'm not used to it .. I mostly prefer the CLI option.

The alternate of apt-get in redhat systems is yum .. you can use yum to install vnc and openssh from yum.

yum install vnc
yum install openssh