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Which VNC Software Is Best?
Futurepower(R) writes "Which VNC software do you think is best, and why? There are several free programs, for example, TightVNC, RealVNC, UltraVNC, and TridiaVNC. Or, is it better to pay for VNC software, like Tridia VNC Pro or Radmin? Which is fastest, most secure, and the least hassle? Which has video resolution scaling of the remote desktop?"
No idea about the others but avoid radmin at all costs. It's a security nightmare, easy to extract passwords out of and very easy to break into.
The only VNC i have used is RealVNC, PCanywhere (Old) and Remote desktop for MS windows. I realize the best and most speedy one out of them all are actually Remote desktop that came with WindowsXP Pro and such.. I still use RealVNC for internet connection. The Java browser that does not requires software download are particularly useful. But perhaps it is time to check out the alternative... I didn't realize there are so many out there at all!
Yea, me too. It's not fantastic, being VNC after all. But it works pretty well, good video quality over a slower connection too. TightVNS is stable too.
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In a *nix-only environment, I prefer ssh with X forwarding.
I've heard there are products that serve X over low bandwidth.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Tight VNC was pretty fast and worked well on my home network on Windows. You have to remember one is the Server and one is the viewer. Tight even will take down your desktop wallpaper automatically in order to save bandwidth. that was a nice feature built in.
Before you try to control your home computer from somewhere else, make sure you know how to configure your router. Your ISP phone agent will love to field those vnc questions I'm sure.
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This was cut and pasted from an email I sent to workmates a while back when I heard about NX initially. These days I prefer to use RealVNC (until I get around to buying a copy of NX) to connect to my XFCE session at home from the office.
Even on what you consider a fast connection (local ethernet) I prefer VNC over X11.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
The best option is to use NX Serverto compress the VNC info. Then use the NX client to connect to the NX Server. This allows you security, snapiness, and best of all, one client to connect to RDP, VNC, X Windows machines. Mike
I agreee. I've used UltraVNC with no problems. You can access your computer through a webpage (the best part of UltraVNC really), provided you have a dynamic dns updater (like no-ip.org). Its really hassle free. All you have to do is forward ports 5900, and you should be set.
If you are behind a college network and want to access someone's computer in there (friend, gf,etc) you can have that person run UltraVNC viewer and "invite" you.
NoMachine NX wins hands down.
You can test drive the free implementation, FreeNX, in Knoppix 3.6.
This is the best in every category listed in the origional post. I test drove it off a cable modem in the states to a dsl in Sweden and it was faster than *VNC on a 10mbit network. It is also more secure in that it runs over ssh by default. I think it may even do audio.
Slightly off topic, but I found a bug within eclipse which was more easily documented with a screen cap movie. With a bit of research, I stumbled on vncrec and vnc2swf via this tutorial. Vncrec is excellent, producing good captures in the proprietary .vnc format, which obviously requires the viewer to have vncrec installed. Vnc2swf is perhaps a bit tricky to setup and the swf's it provides are of good quality, as shown here, and being flash(4) is nice and cross platform, relying on the ming libraries for encoding. I'm still researching audio mixing, but it should be possible to record in real-time to mp3 and multiplex into the output swf via vnc2swf's -soundfile param. Recording in this manner would be _great_ for complex api documentation, complex state-dependante bug reports, and other documentation applications.
Missing choice (you insensitive clods)! I only use microVNC! You know, for those times when you simply MUST remotely connect to the 8-bit microcontroller in your toaster when you're at work.
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Personally, I use VNCThing. I found Chicken of the VNC, and it crapped out on me so many times that I got rid of it. Link to VNCThing
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
According to this web page, RealVNC is spyware, ha!
If you're using VNC, you probably notice how slow it is. UltraVNC/TightVNC is a big improvement over regular VNC, as well as XWindows, but they're all dog slow.
NX (by NoMachine) and FreeNX (the GPL'ed edition) are REALLY fast, on the other hand. They are 100% encrypted through SSH and can tunnel to VNC, X, and RDP....
NX will currently only host from Unix/Linux. However, there are a bunch of clients.
I made an IMMEDIATE change to FreeNX/NX after using it only once. Now, I no longer use VNC for Linux....
Tarantella's been around for years doing remote/ low bandwith X11 and is worth checking out too.
Yes and yes. Being able to remotely connect to a running X session is the main reason to use VNC on X anyway; if you want a new X session you might as well just run an X server locally (excellent free X servers are now available for windows, including a java applet one and a port of XFree86 that is integrated with Windows).
IMHO X should support moving/duplicating sessions and single apps, and I believe work to that effect is progressing (slowly) on freedesktop.org. When it is complete (and combined with NX compression for slow links) it will make VNC for X mostly redundant.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
FreeNX is for when it absolutely, positively, has to be double the speed. (-:
The NX protocol is essentially compressed and cached X; it talks to VNC, RDP and whetever else through its own proxy.
Mandrake 10.0 RPMs are here and here. The SRPMs will probably rebuild fine on 10.1 or 9.2 and are here and here.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There's a great deal of truth in what you say!
I recently posted a list of the VNC's in debian, with a description of how each one serves a different purpose to LUGOD's vox-tech mailing list. The post is quoted here in full, so that you do not need to click the link, thereby slashdotting their server.
I was asked "Is there one implementation that's better than the others? Why did this piece of software fork so many times?"
And I answered as follows:
Because they're all different. Some for framebuffers, some serve differently, some compressed, some not. Read on, and I think you'll getthe idea.
(Search packages.debian.org for vnc, and you'll see all of these pop up.)
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.
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
I prefer MetaVNC as it is a "window aware" VNC, and allows a gnome desktop, for example, to coexist with a Windows desktop.
I haven't tried it extensively, but there's another VNC that derived from UltraVNC called MetaVNC.
You may want to check this out too.
I miss anything?
Yes.
Radmin is tight. When on a LAN, you can bump the settings up to 65,535 colors and change the refresh rate up to 300-400 per second, and it's great. Obviously over long distances it's better to use lesser settings, but I have been using radmin for a while and it's great with it's telnet, file transfer, shutdown, watch and full control features.
Can 8-bit microcontrollers run a graphical user interface ? I mean, logically, one would be limited to 1 MB of memory, and that would be pretty little to put the application, GUI, and TCP/IP stack into...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.