Chapter 14. Using VNC
The VNC System
VNC (Virtual Network Computer) is a low-bandwidth cross-platform display system. It can be used to control and display a Windows XPdesktop from a Mac, a Linux desktop from a Windows 2000 machine, or a Mac desktop from a Solaris workstation.
The VNC protocol is named RFB, for Remote Frame Buffer. In VNC terminology, the system on which the desktop is running is the server, and the system used to access the desktop is called the viewer (or client). Binary viewers are available for most platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. There are also several Java viewers that can be run as web applets—therefore, allowing VNC access from any web-enabled browser.
This chapter covers some of the many ways in which VNC may be used in an X-based environment. In addition to the red (X client) and blue (X server) hostnames used in previous chapters, I’ll use green to refer to the system on which the VNC client software is running.
Xvnc contains a very simple web server, which can be used to serve a Java applet version of the VNC viewer. This permits users to connect to the server from any Java-enabled browser—no special client is needed. The reason that the web server is built into Xvnc is so that the appropriate JavaScript parameters can be substituted into the web page before it is served.
Windows and Mac OS are both designed as single-user systems, so in those environments the VNC server software takes control of the ...
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