Palm and Treo Hacks

Control Your Computer Remotely

Have you ever wanted to do something on your computer from across the room? How about from the other side of the world?

It can be useful to be able to access your desktop machine remotely. You could checkserver logs, restart failed services, or even post to your weblog [Hack #39] . If you have a home network, you can set up all of your computers so that they are accessible remotely.

VNC (Virtual NetworkComputing) is an open-source application that is designed to allow one machine to control another machine over a network. It was originally developed at Bell Labs. VNC is also useful for collaboration. Multiple viewers (clients) can connect to the same server. Each viewer has its own cursor. You can use these cursors to point to content on the remote machine. The viewers display the cursors for all of the other viewers as well. Each cursor is displayed differently from the others so you can tell them apart.

The server side comes in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors. You can download these versions and get more information from the main VNC web site (http://www.realvnc.com). There are other versions of VNC available as well. For Windows and Linux machines, there is TightVNC (http://www.tightvnc. com). For Windows, there is also UltraVNC (http://www.ultravnc.com). UltraVNC supports server-side scaling. For Macs, you will need OSXvnc (http://www.redstonesoftware.com/vnc.html). The built-in VNC on Macs doesn’t work with PalmVNC.

You will also need an application ...