Hello,

Here's an awkward situation: the X on my friend's PC went broke (Ubuntu 10.04) for unknown reason. Now it would get stuck forever at Ubuntu loading screen. But he can do Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to the console.

I'd like to rescue him, but I can not get there physically. Since it is hard to tell what is the reason of failure, it is very time consuming to tell various commands over the phone and listen him telling what is the response. He can access the Internet from his console session. It would be much better, if there would be some tool that would allow me to access his PC remotely and get control of his keyboard and display output.

He is on his home network, behind router. I don't think that he is competent enough to set up port routing, so this tool has to be able to access the remote PC in passive mode. I hope that it is possible to install this theoretical tool by simple apt-get command, run it, it would register in some public server that would issue session id, and I could use this session id to get access to his PC console session. Ideally, he could see on his screen what I am writing and what output I am getting. With this, I hope to help him to get his Ubuntu back to normal.

All that, of course, is unneeded, if one tells me how to fix such problem when there is very little known about the context.