VNC [Re: [vox-tech] Re: vox-tech Digest, Vol 2, Issue 41]

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 01:08:32PM -0700, Norm Matloff wrote:
> 
> I've been using VNC for about a year now.  When I am away from home and
> office and accessing my office Linux box from public terminals (which
> alas, are always MS Wins), VNC is invaluable.  However, I am also
> frustrated by its minor shortcomings, such as:
> 
>    * Certain control characters, notably ctrl-a, do not seem to work.

I'ts been quite a while since my last VNC session, but as an Emacs
user I definitely would have noticed that. I imagine it's a flaw with
the software/setup, and not with VNC itself, because I had no probs
with ctrl-a.

>    * Occasionally the windowing system of the client gets so hopelessly
>      messed up that the client needs to be rebooted.

Again, probably flaw in implementation.

>    * Since VNC by definition is trying to fit a whole desktop screen
>      into a browser space, one must do scrolling, and this becomes
>      quite annoying.

This is not the definition of VNC. VNC happens on more than just
browser windows. There are clients which will map the session to your
entire screen (don't know about clients which do this on Linux). The
scrolling too is a shortcoming of the client. Even in the browser
space, more convenient means of scrolling could be provided. However,
if you have control over the desktop size, that would seem a better
solution than scrolling all of the time.

>    * VNC does tend to be slow.

True dat.

> Moreover, the documentation is not very good at all.  It is not clear,
> for instance, how to configure the windowing on a Linux server.  

The windowing? Seems to me that would be an X issue, not a VNC issue.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name