Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop Community Edition For Linux

Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop Community Edition or Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop (OVD) is an open source computer operating system designed from the ground up to provide an Ubuntu-based application delivery platform and virtual desktop that supports Linux hosted application and desktop sessions. It also supports Windows remote desktop services.

The Community edition of Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop is distributed as an appliance in the OVA (Open Virtualization) file format of approximately 900MB in size, which means that you must import it into a supported virtualization software, such as Oracle VirtualBox, in order to use it.

Considering the fact that you have a working VirtualBox installation, open it and choose the “Import Appliance” option from the File menu. Browser for the OVA file and open it, click the Next button and then click the Import button to import the appliance into VirtualBox. Don’t forget to click Agree on the license dialog and wait for the appliance to be imported.

After the system is fully loaded, you will be dropped to a shell prompt where you are instructed to open a web browser and point it to an IP address. From there, you can login into the Ulteo web-based administration interface using the “admin” username and the “admin” password or start a new virtual desktop session. The desktop environment is traditional, comprised of a single taskbar that includes a simple main menu and essential system functions.

The Community Edition of Ulteo OVD offers a great selection of open-source applications, among which we can mention the LibreOffice office suite, Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, Leafpad text editor, Pidgin multi-protocol instant messenger, Mozilla Firefox web browser, GIMP image editor, Adobe Reader PDF document viewer, as well as the Thunar file manager.