Who needs VNC when you have ssh?
I spent too much time banging my head against Ubuntu’s vncserver so I could log into a remote desktop (just like Remote Desktop on Windows with Terminal Services), until I realized that I didn’t need to load the whole stinking desktop! That would mean sending the entire screen over anyway which is probably not as fast as just sending the program I need. Since OS X has it’s own X-Windows server, all I had to do was ssh into the Ubuntu box a little differently to “tunnel X”, and then launch the program on Ubuntu I want to run which then appears on my Mac’s desktop. Since I am really lazy, I just ran the entire gnome-panel.
ssh -X -c blowfish my_login@my_ubuntu_box gnome-panel
