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The Suse machine is a vmware virtual machine on my laptop.

I can log in to the console using the VmWare app, but would like to log into a graphical user interface from Windows 7.

As you can tell i am a bit lost in linux world...

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The easiest way to access graphicaly a linux system is by using VNC, the server part is really easy to setup (the openSuse wiki provides informations about it here), and there are a bunch of VNC clients running on windows, i usually use RealVNC. Imho this would be the simpliest solution for you.

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Two options I'd look at.

One, enable a VNC server on the SUSE machine, then use VNC Viewer to connect to that machine and see the desktop.

Depending on what you're doing on that machine, a second option is to download the XLive CD (or some other X client for Windows) and then secure shell into the SUSE machine (ssh -X user@ip) and then you can run remote graphical applications as if they were on your Windows system.

Personally if you use VNC I'd look at creating SSH tunnels for VNC; VNC is not encrypted so passwords and activities could be sniffed on a network. You'd do something similar to ssh -p 5900 -f -N -L 5900:ipaddress:5900 yourname@ipaddress to create the tunnel, then open VNC Viewer and connect to the localhost on your Windows system. This means you'd need to use putty or cygwin to get SSH on your Windows computer first, but once you do that you'll have a secure encrypted tunnel between your system and your VM over which to view the desktop. If the command line is wrong someone else may edit this or correct it, but it should be enough to put you on the right track if you want to search how to set this up.

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As mentioned, VNC is an excellent choice. I would also like to mention TeamViewer. TeamViewer is also free, but sets up encryption automatically for you plus it allows to to access your VM from over the internet without the need to configure your home router. The only command line knowledge you will need is for the RPM installation.

If you chose to go this route, you will need the TeamViewer server on the Linux computer you wish to control and the client on the Windows computer you are controlling it from. TeamViewer will assign your computer a random numeric code and passphrase (you can also elect to set your own password) that are unique to your computer.

If you have not done so already, change the network adapter settings in VMWare from NAT to bridged. While NAT will get the VM on the Internet, it will not allow it to communicate with your local network. Setting the adapter to bridged will solve this.

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