Re: What is VNC?

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

Manegold wrote:
> 
> 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

  well, vnc server IS X server (on unix machines).

  so you are not avoiding X, you are replacing one X server (+ the rest
of X) by another one (you still need the rest of X like fonts, programs,
utilities etc., whether you use the ones that come with xfree86 or some
different one)

> as efficient via Network as X, but I don't really understand why. Maybe
> someone can elaborate on that.

  it depends, some operation are more efficient some are less. basically
vnc transfers bitmaps, X transfers 'commands' (very simplified).

  for example the moving of a window - if you have X window, the moving
is done locally (by local X server), with vnc the moving is done in vnc
server and is only displayed locally, which is of course slower (much
more network traffic).

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

  ???

  windows have no X desktop.

  if you mean that you can use vnc to view windows desktop but not to
view your 'normal' linux X desktop, that's sort of true, it's not
possible with 'straight' vnc, but I've just seen ITP on debian-devel for
a program that does that (not sure how well it works).

	erik