Manegold wrote:
Hi!
I'm wondering what VNC is. According to the package listing it is a
remote display system. Therefore something like X.
But what does that mean? Can I use it instead of X?
Does it need special apps that make use of it, or can normal X/KDE/Gnome
- apps make use of it?
What are the advantages of VNC over X?
TIA
Thorsten
If you're familiar with Timbuktu or PCAnywhere, etc, you have a fair
idea of what VNC is. The big difference is that it's free and
cross-platform.
Example 1:
You have a WinNT box.
You have a second WinNT box.
You're sitting at the second WinNT box, and need to remote control
the first WinNT box. If you have the VNC "server" running on the first
box, and the VNC "client" running on the second, you just connect from
the second to the first. Then you'll have a window open on your second
box that lets you see the first box, just like you are sitting there.
Example 2:
You have a Macintosh box running VNC server.
You have a Linux box running VNC client.
You can sit at your Linux box, and connect to the Mac VNC server;
this will open a window on your Linux box allowing you to remote-control
the Mac box.
There are pros and cons of VNC vs PCAnywhere vs Timbuktu (vs others?).
When it comes to controlling a Linux X display, I'm a little more hazy.
Near as I can figure, if you want to control a Linux box using VNC, you
don't run your normal X server. Instead you run vncserver from a non-X
environment. This starts the VNC server, but you don't see any GUI
locally. To see a local GUI, you then have to do some magic to get your
window manager to run on the VNC server; this means that you're not
running your accelerated X server, so you may see some speed issues,
etc. Then from the second Linux (or Mac, or Windows) box, you run the
VNC client and connect like in Example 2 above.
In other words, as far as I can tell, you can't run your super-duper
accelerated, hot-off-the-press, XFree86 server locally if you want to
see the same desktop locally and via remote control. This is not the
(semi-equivalent) case on Windows, but it seems to be the case on Linux.
I may very well misunderstand how the thing works, but this is the
conclusion I've come to after trying it three or four times over the
past couple of years.
Kent
