Re: What is VNC?

[Manegold <manegold@uni-trier.de>]

Alson van der Meulen wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> how about xvncviewer connecting to localhost, from using the super-duper
> accelerated, hot-off-the-press, XFree86 server


As I have come to understand, that will give you two desktops. One under
the super-duper ... XFree86 Server and one via VNC (running in a Window,
liken an application, on that said super-duper X-Server).

Also you always get a whole Desktop (even if it's in a window), while
with X you get only the window for the respective application. That
seems to be preferrable, if you want to run 5 apps on 5 different
computers, since with VNC you would then have 5 Desktops on one screen
(one for each computer).

>From what I learned off the web page of VNC (thanks for the link to to
poster!), I can't use VNC as a replacement for X (unless you get the
non-X vncviewer to work on the console), which would have been
interesting because of the footprint of X. Also it seems that VNC is not
as efficient via Network as X, but I don't really understand why. Maybe
someone can elaborate on that.

Making the X Desktop accessible / transferrable via VNC, as is possible
with Windows, is not possible with UNIX/Linux.

Thank you to all that replied to my question. I think I know now, what I
can use VNC for.

Thorsten