On Fri, 15 Feb 2002 Daniel Churchill wrote: > On Thursday 14 February 2002 04:44 pm, M. Jentges wrote: > > Ok it's been a long couple days, but AFAIK can't you accomplish the same > > thing with VNC? choice of window managers is limited I think, but.... > > Perhaps. I have used VNC for accessing Windows machines remotely across a > LAN. I'm not familiar with the specifics of how these programs all work, > but I believe that with VNC, the information is transmitted as purely > graphical, while with the local X server running on my Windows PC, all > that is transferred is the drawing instructions, which are much less > bandwidth intensive, and thus, perform better. Maybe I'm wrong about > this. If someone knows better, correct me. > Also, having never used VNC with Linux, maybe someone on the list can tell > me - does the VNC Linux client take over the X desktop on the Linux > workstation when someone is using VNC? That is, can you watch someone > using the workstation remotely from the actual console (or vice versa)? > This is what the Windows version of VNC does, and I don't really want that > behavior for my particular situation. The VNC server works somewhat differently under linux/unix than it does under windows. The windows VNC server (unless somehow coupled with Windows Terminal Services ...) is limited to working through the single-user GUI provided by windows, whereas a linux or unix machine could conceivably serve dozens of VNC sessions, potentially all belonging to different users, each having its own X-windows "desktop". The VNC sessions served by a linux or unix server do not have to be bound to the GUI (if any) running on that machine's console display. VNC does function by transferring (encoded) graphics bitmap data. However, X does not always use its network bandwidth really efficiently so, in some situations, it's conceivable that VNC might perform better. Joel