|
Virtual Network Computing
|
VNC Freely available here!What is VNC? - A practical introductionVNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures. |
||||
The VNC system allows you to access the same desktop from a wide variety of platforms. |
Many of us at ORL, for example, use a VNC viewer running on a PC on our desks to display our Unix environments which are running on a large server in the machine room downstairs.
For this simple mode of operation, you could achieve a similar effect by installing an X server on your PC. The important factors which distinguish VNC from other remote display systems such as X are as follows:
The name originates from our development of very-thin-client ATM network computers. The Videotile was essentially an LCD display with a pen input and a fast ATM connection. Because the VNC viewer is a software-only version of our Videotile, and so provides 'workstations' which can be created or deleted at will, we named the system Virtual Network Computing.
We have some screenshots of very simple VNC desktops running and being displayed on a variety of platforms.
More details can be found in the documentation
Copyright 1998 - The Olivetti & Oracle Research Lab