Here’s a few programs I use to enable remote control/access of my Raspberry Pi.
NOTE: My Pi is running the Raspian OS, a modified Debian Weezy.
SSH My Pi starts a SSH (Secure SHell) server at bootup by default. I connect to this server using PuTTY a SSH client freely available for most OS/devices. PuTTY provides a command line console where you remotely login to the Pi and issue commands.
VNC I’m using TightVNC to remotely access the Pi’s Desktop. See VNC (Virtual Network Computing). Once the server is setup on the Pi you’ll be able to connect to it with a VNC-Viewer, which are freely available for most OS/devices.
SFTP The best free FTP client is FileZilla. I use this if I need to copy many files to the Pi.
Samba Samba provideds secure, stable and fast file services, amongst other things. Installing the server on the Pi is quite straight forward, I used this article at HowToGeek as a reference.
I used a 8GB UFD for my ../shares/ folder. I had problems getting permissions right for ../shares/. A solution was to clean format the UFD to ext4 using Gparted then create the shares folder and set the correct permissions all on another linux system.
I can now access the RASPBERRYPI shares folder from either Windows or Linux.
MPD My systems Music Player Daemon (server) starts on bootup, I use it mainly for playing Radio Streams, see TuneIn. On the Pi I use ncmpc to connect to MPD locally, this can also be achieved remotely using PuTTY. A better solution is to remotely use a Music Player Client written for the OS in question.
So, for Windows I use Auremo. A solid client that handles Streams and Playlists well.
For Linux I use Gnome Music Player Client. A Good client with lots of features via plugins.