On Dec 9, 2004, at 2:06 PM, Ranga Nathan wrote:
IMHO, plain vnc via browser and without X does not add any value. Putty is much better.
Hunh?
VNC exports a desktop (well, technically, a rectangular bitmap, I think) and relays mouse and keyboard commands to it, and updates the bitmap it sends as it changes. On Unix, therefore, vncserver runs what's basically X-with-a-framebuffer in order to provide that rectangular bitmap in the first place. On a Unix box, there's really no such thing as vnc-without-X. I guess if you *had* a framebuffer-based text display you COULD export it via vnc, but that would be pretty dumb (although, sadly, not that different than what many Intel "servers" do to have a serial console, which is--I am Not Making This Up--to turn a VGA video stream into something they're running over RS-232 (or sometimes USB, which is at least fast enough that it's not insanely painful) and ship that out over the wire for reconstituting into an image at the other end).
However, vncserver is running, usually, with a very lightweight window manager--fvwm or something--rather than the bloated hog of a full-on KDE or Gnome environment. And X itself isn't all that resource-intensive by modern standards.
That said, yeah, I also forego it in favor of plain old ssh whenever possible, because Unix is designed, pretty much, around the concept of sharp simple tools that take input from stdin, write output to stdout, write errors to stderr, and can pipe one process's stdout to the next one's stdin. So, honestly, a 24x80 terminal window gives you almost complete functionality, and you can still get quite a lot done with a dumb (glass tty) terminal (e.g. 3215 console mode). But then I'm pretty much a Luddite when it comes to pretty interfaces (I hypocritically type into the lovely and useful Mac Mail.app).
Adam
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