[vox-tech] VNC - awesome!

[Ken Bloom]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 18:25:24 -0700
p at dirac.org (Peter Jay Salzman) wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> After months of procrastinating, I finally got around to installing
> VNC. All I have to say is...  WOW!  Totally and completely neat!  It's
> a VERY impressive piece of software!
> 
> I have a couple of questions:
> 
> 
> 1. A Google search turned up a number of different VNC clients like
>    "realvnc", "ultravnc", and "tightvnc".  The one I downloaded was
>    from:
> 
>       http://www.realvnc.com/
> 
>    The server was installed on a win2k machine and the rpm for my
>    Linux client was converted into a deb from an rpm via alien.  I
>    chose this implementation (realvnc) because it was obviously GPL'd
>    and the first one I found.  I had no way of comparing the different
>    implementations.
> 
>    Is there one implementation that's better than the others?  Why did
>    this piece of software fork so many times?

Because they're all different. Some for framebuffers, some serve
differently, some compressed, some not. Read on, and I think you'll get
the idea.

(Search packages.debian.org for vnc, and you'll see all of these pop
up.)

First a couple of normal ones:
==============================

TightVNC uses JPEG or zlib to compress the data stream to optimize for
lower bandwidth connections. It is under the GPL. Packages:
tightvncserver, and xtightvncviewer

The default VNC viewer (packages vncserver and xvncviewer) are (c) 2002
RealVNC, and (C)1994-2000 AT&T. They are under the GPL. This seems to be
what you alien'ed.


Some wierder VNC's in debian:
=============================

x2vnc - use a vnc server as a second screen, so you can move the mouse
between the local machine and a machine across the network that is
running the vnc client.

directvnc - doesn't require x - uses libdirectfb-0.9-20. Depends on zlib
and libjpeg, so it may work with tightvnc's protocol

svncviewer - depends on svgalib

x11vnc - the x11vnc server works the same way the Windows 2000 vnc
server does - mirroring the physical screen over vnc

linuxvnc - "With linuxvnc you can export your currently running text
sessions to any VNC client. So it can be useful, if you want to move to
another computer without having to log out and if you've forgotten to
attach a 'screen' session to it, or to help a distant colleague to solve
a problem."

3dwm-vncclient - I think you get the picture

vnc-java - I think you know what this is. Why bother with it? Probably
so you can serve yourself a vnc client over HTTP, probably.

tkvnc - a wrapper for xvncviewer

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