On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 01:18:12PM +0100, Jon Dye wrote:
chrisisbd@leary.csoft.net wrote:
On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 12:08:15PM +0100, Tim Green wrote:
On 5/25/06, Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk wrote:
On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 11:46:10AM +0100, David Simon Cooper wrote:
Tim Green wrote:
On 5/25/06, chrisisbd@leary.csoft.net chrisisbd@leary.csoft.net wrote: > Does anyone have any ideas about, or is there a web site that will > tell me about, the relative speeds of different ways of running X > applications across the internet?
Investigate VNC - it was designed for this.
I use the free version of VNC for things like this and use custom port numbers which make it a little harder to sniff.
*All* of which is entirely irrelevant to my original question! :-)
Running application xxx directly as an X application using an ssh tunnel will surely be faster than running application xxx on the remote system and then running the whole X desktop via VNC (over an ssh tunnel or not).
I found using TightVNC (which adds compression) with a minimal desktop was faster than using remote X with ssh (even with compression turned on).
... and no, it's *not* true that VNC was "designed for this", VNC was designed for remote control of another computer and that is most definitely not what I want to do. It could well be that someone else is using that remote computer at the remote location.
You can start the vncserver up as it's own xserver that is only visible when vnc'ing to the machine and can exist at the same time as the local xserver that is shown on the monitor.
I used to use exactly this setup to run a single application. I had a minimal window manager in the vncserver and I ran a single app. I could connect and disconnect as I wanted and the app would stay running and none of it interfered with the normal xserver. Of course now I think I might try NX rather than TightVNC but on my last attempt I failed to make it work properly.
I might try tightvnc then and see how it goes, thanks.