[ale] fixing linux laptop remotely

[Todor Fassl]

I gave a friend in another state a laptop with debian stretch installed. 
He is a very smart guy but knows next to nothing about computers. Today, 
he emailed me asking if I could tell him how to fix some stuff. Well, I 
told him but it is pretty scary.  I mean he is the kind of person to 
whom I'd have to explain what it means to press Alt+F2. If I say type 
"sudo apt-get install ...", I am going to tell him not to type the 
quotes. Get it? He is really smart but he just never got into computers. 
To tell you the truth, he just uses the laptop to play D&D with us.

Anyway, openssh-server is installed and running. But he is always going 
to be behind a firewall. What I'd like to do is to have his laptop look 
for updates on my linux server when it boots up. So if I want to install 
something, I put a file on my server that says "apt-get install ..." and 
when he reboots, it downloads that script and runs it. Or something like 
that.

Or maybe a way for his machine to make a connection to my server that I 
can then take over and start typing commands?. I don't know. Any ideas 
welcome.

One complication, I'm blind so whatever I end up doing probably cannot 
be GUI based. Few remote GUI apps are going to work with a screen 
reader. For example, I can run an X11 program on a remote machine and 
have the GUI appear on my machine but the screen reader cannot do 
anything with the GUI.  It knows there's a window there but it cannot 
read it.
-
Todd