Re: [tlug] Xming - COOL!

[Joe Larabell <fred62@???>]

> Having used both. I would have to say that X tends to be faster except
> for graphical applications like gimp.  My understanding of the VNC
> protocol is that it just sends a compressed bitmap across the network
> which will almost always be less efficient then a command to draw a
> window.

Hmmm... I had the opposite experience. I work in Tokyo for a company in
the Silicon Valley area and I have had occasion to want to use a GUI
application on a machine over there (not a shell window -- for that I
would obviously use ssh). Almost every time it was like watching grass
grow. I could almost tell the sequence in which the various lines and
rectangles were being drawn because they were showing up on my display one
at a time.

I believe (although I do not know for sure) that VNC does some kind of
delta analysis (like curses used to do for text) and only sends the parts
of the screen that change. For a busy graphical app, that could be as
little as a single button change, a popup menu, or a small block of
black-and-white text.

And while our in-house network is fairly stable now, about eight years ago
we used to experience daily outages, sometimes more than one per day. If
you're on ssh and/or X and you lose the network, your work is gone. With
VNC, it's just a matter of connecting again. The running processes don't
even stop in the interim.

> ... The big advantage of VNC is that because it just sends bitmaps
> you can use it both ways, i.e windows <=> Linux, OSX <=> Linux, Zaurus
> <=> desktop Linux

In theory, yes. Unfortunately, I was never able to get the vncserver to
run on my SL-C3100. Of course, I can't give up the Sharp ROM, since I use
the kanji handwriting recognition probably more than any other single
function on the machine.

---
Joseph L (Joe) Larabell            Never fight with a dragon
http://larabell.org                     for thou art crunchy
                                  and goest well with cheese.