William Hooper wrote:
Jeremy Brown said:Yeah, seconds after I fired off that last email I started thinking, "wait, I'm not sure that's true". For some reason I thought it had to start X with an alternate configuration or something, which required root access. But I may be wrong.
Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
VNC requires root access on the server to set up.I'm curious why anybody would want to do X forwarding when it seems to me that VNC would be faster and easier, not to mention more robust (if the network connection dies, the session is still there on the server, waiting for me).
Am I missing something? Is X forwarding better than VNC in some way?
I don't see any reason why it would. It doesn't use any privledged ports.
That's true...I guess I should have said "each VNC session can only do one thing at a time". In order for N users to have separate VNC access to a machine, you'd have to start at least N VNC servers on it, and assign ports/passwords to each user. This quickly ends up being a hassle in my opinion, since the equivalent X forwarding setup requires almost zero configuration.VNC is also limited
to one user at a time.
Huh? Multiple users can look at the same VNC session and multiple VNC
sessions can be started on a single machine.
Also, AFAIK each VNC server requires a completely separate running instance of X, which can gobble up your memory quickly. Again, the equivalent X forwarding setup only takes as much memory as the client application needs.
Jeremy
