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Yeah, I put in the tags but then forgot to paste the URL... I tried to post a followup but of course you have to wait two minutes before you can post... and so I forgot as I got busy with other things.

Anyway, the product page is here and they have a more full-featured version as well it seems. I'm not really in the field directly but have done some GIS stuff before.

Netmeeting http://www.microsoft.com/windows/NetMeeting/Featur es/default.ASPfor winmdows is free and has remote desktop sharing as well as conferencing. You can also keep a directory of machines to connect to which makes maintaining a network of windows machines very simple.

For Windows to *nix, there is MicroImages X server http://www.microimages.com/freestuf/mix/ which is free for the mac. This is fast, easy to use and setup.

As for security, running X over a network is leaving your system wide open. For security you already have TCP port 6000 closed and start x with the notcp which will restrict remote sessions.

Let's see... Besides http://www.hummingbird.com/products/nc/exceed/inde x.html, there's X-Win32, WinaXe, and MI/X"

If you run VNC over SSH compression I find it to be a decent soultion. I usually use the viewer with the -bgr233 (xvncviewer) or restrict pixels to 8-bot (for windows).

Someone on the rdesktop mailing list mentioned creating a RDP server for UNIX, similar to the VNC server. How well it works, if it works with MS RDP clients, and where to find more information I do not know.

Lastly, Citrix has created versions of MetaFrame for Solaris 2.6, 7, and 8 on SPARC and 7 and 8 on x86, AIX 4.3.3, and HP-UX 11.0. Too bad they don't do Linux.

>>Back on topic: will qt free edition (or xfree86)
>>ever be ported to windows 9x?
>Probably not in this lifetime.

YM "not by Trolltech." Qt Free is GPL and can be ported. XFree has already been ported to NT, and there's a good shareware X server from Microimages called MI/X. I don't think it would be that hard to get Qt Free running under Win32, or does Qt have some technical issues I'm not aware of that one of its biggest competitors that has been ported to Win32 doesn't?

"write one, run anywhere" widget set

Java Swing, Tcl/Tk, GTK+, Allegro... The field is already crowded.

You may want to use your Power Macs as X terminals in a network environment -- MI/X works fine as an X terminal emulator. You may also want to make your PC a true X Server and run multiple X clients from your desktop.

I use MI/X at work, but I had to do a lot of work with the font configuration file to get a moderatley complex X app (Netscape LDAP console) to display properly.

While it works fairly well, it is only fairly stable and comes with TWM - you might be able to use a window manager running on a remote box but I would imagine it would not like it much.

In summary, it's OK for very simple uses but not really a good replacement for a real X system if you do a lot of work on a UNIX box. I found VNC a lot more useful.

Simple X servers already exist for the MacOS such as the free MI/X,as well as things like White Pine/PowerLAN's eXodus. These would either run under the classic MacOS emulation if they don't get ported to MacOS X's native environment. MI/X is pretty poor, but eXodus works well -- I use it to run X apps on my PowerBook.

It's not like X servers don't exist for the Mac or anything. :)

Actually, there's a few of them. Exceed (from Hummingbird), Excursion, XLink, MI/X from Micro Images. I also read in a slashdot discussion a while ago a mention of a free X server for Windows, but I don't remember anything about it.