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VNC remote-display system freely available
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ORL, the Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory, has made available the
first public release of the Virtual Network Computing (VNC) system.
VNC is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a
computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is
running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of
machine architectures.
Many of us at ORL, for example, use a VNC viewer running on a Windows
PC on our desks to display our Unix environments which are running on
a large server in the machine room downstairs.
What makes it different from other systems?
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For this simple mode of operation, you could achieve a similar effect
by installing an X server on your PC. The important factors which
distinguish VNC from other remote display systems such as X are as
follows:
* No state is stored at the viewer. This means you can leave your
desk, go to another machine, whether next door or several hundred
miles away, reconnect to your desktop from there and finish the
sentence you were typing. Even the cursor will be in the same place.
* It is small and simple. The Win32 viewer, for example, is about 150K
in size and can be run directly from a floppy. There is no
installation needed.
* It is truly platform-independent. A desktop running on a Linux
machine may be displayed on a Windows PC. Or a Solaris machine. Or
any number of other architectures. The simplicity of the protocol
makes it easy to port to new platforms. We have a Java viewer, which
will run in any Java-capable browser. We have a Windows server,
allowing you to view a remote Windows NT desktop on any of these
platforms using exactly the same viewer. We developed VNC after the
success of our Teleporting system, which was purely X-based, to give
us platform-independence.
* It is sharable. One desktop can be displayed and used by several
viewers at once, allowing CSCW-style applications.
* It is free! You can download it, use it, and redistribute it under
the terms of the GNU Public Licence. We provide binaries and source
code for the following platforms:
o Solaris 2.5
o Digital Unix 3.2
o x86 Linux 2.0
o x86 Windows NT / Windows 95
For more information please see the VNC web pages at:
http://www.orl.co.uk/vnc/
or send email to vnc _at_ orl.co.uk.
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