View desktop of *very remote* Ubuntu box from my MacBook Pro
You can do it easily using ssh port forwarding. Open terminal and enter

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 remote_ip

with any other applicable settings you need. This will forward port 5900 on your local machine to port 5900 on the remote machine. If you need to change to a different local port (say, if you're already running a VNC server on your local machine), change the first 5900 to something else.

Then once the ssh connection is running, just VNC to localhost:5900, and you should get a connection to your remote machine.

If you don't have a VNC client already, there's one built in to Mac OS X. Open Finder, press &#x2318;K and enter vnc://localhost:5900 as shown below, and hit connect.