As I said before, given that I'm only just starating out with this thing (TigerVNC) I shouldn't really be throwing out suggestions to the developers at this point, but as that has never stopped me before...
I'm not sure what the target market / user base is for this package, but if the developers hope to make this into a mainstream mass market kind of thing, then I do believe that it would be most helpful to make it rather more of a "no brainer", specifically on the Windows (server) side. I mean seriously, in an ideal universe, I'd just be able to tell my friend Jessica in Palm Beach (who has very meager understanding of computers generally, and who I would like to be able to help, remotely, with her occasional computer glitches) "Look, go to this web site, download this thing, install it, following the prompts, tell me the password, and then I'll connect to you and get your problem sorted out." I dunno if any of you folks have ever interacted with Dell software support, but this is pretty much how their system works. They tell you to run this (pre-installed) then and they give you a magic cookie and then within 5 minutes they are controlling your Windows PC and are seeing everything that you are seeing. It's smooth, a no-brainer, and it works. I know. I've seen it. The Windows end-luser doesn't have to diddle around with any firewall settings, and in fact never even has to set-up a password. And as long as I'm on this rant, allow me to just mention a couple of other unexpected oddities that cropped up as I was trying to get this thing going on the Windows (server) side... After receiveing a clue or three here on this list, I properly ran the Windows server configurator tool/thingy and set a password and other options. (Actually, I _did not_ set any other options, because all of the defaults looked entirely sensible to me.) Then I did what I almost always do with newly installed programs on my Windows system that I may want to re-run later on... I put a fresh shortcut/icon on my desktop for the thing... in this case the TigerVNC (User-mode) server itself. Of course, then I wanted to run the thing, so I double clicked it. Nothing happened. This is often an indication that I failed to tap that second click in fast enough to make Windows happy. So what did I do? (What would _you_ do?) I double-clicked the thing again, of course. Well, come to find out a bit later on that the effect of all this was that (unbeknownst to me) I ended up having not one but *two* copies of the TigerVNC server running on the Windows system simultaneously! Yikes! I quickly rebooted in order to clean out this flotsam, and thus returned to a more normal state, but the more I think about it, the more the very notion of having two of these things running at the same time is deeply puzzling. I mean why didn't the second one notice that there was one copy already running (and just exit)? And perhaps even more mysteriously, how the bleep could two of these even manage to run (without one of them erroring out) anyway? Maybe this is just my UNIX networking experience getting in the way of my understanding (of Windows networking) again, but where I come from, if a given server process starts listening to/on a given port, that port becomes the exclusive property of that specific process for as long as the process is running. If some other process starts up and tries to listen to that port also, it should get an error, either in the call to socket() or in the call to listen(). So anyway, _something_ is wrong with this picture, and I'll be damned if I know what it is. Is the second running instance of the TigerVNC server (on Windows) failing to receive proper errors from the kernel, or is it receiving them but then (improperly) ignoring them? Regards, rfg P.S. Oh! And by the way, the _way_ I found out that I had two running instances of the TigerVNC srever on my Win7 systems was _not_ via the method that one would expect. Sure, I could have looked and seen this odd state of affairs in the Task Manager process list, but I didn't. In fact I would never have known what had happened if I hadn't, on a whim, taken a quick look at the baby-sized icons that reside over toward the right hand side of the task bar. (I'm not really a Windows guy so I don't even know what the proper name for these things is/are. Are those called "notifications"?) Anyway, I clicked on the little up-arrow that always appears just to the left of those things, and then clicked on "Configure" and started scrolling down through the list of notification do-dads that I could configure. It was then that I noticed that there were _two_ of these things in the list, each with a little tiger-face icon attached to it. That's how I deduced that I must have been running, totally unintentionally, two separate instances of the TigerVNC server at the same time on the Windows box. (I'm still sitting here scratching my head, trying to figure out what the semantics would be of having two of these running in parallel on a single Windows box.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sponsored by Intel(R) XDK Develop, test and display web and hybrid apps with a single code base. Download it for free now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=111408631&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Tigervnc-users mailing list Tigervnc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tigervnc-users
