On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 07:40:09 -0500, xpyttl wrote:
"Leland C. Scott" wrote in message
...

I can see no advantage to running an exported xsession from a *nix
machine
to a windows desktop.

Except when that is all you have access to use. I have a company laptop,

Well, there is a lot more than that. Most of us interact from time to time
with other people, and it's a Windoze/Office world out there. Sorry, that's
the way it is. You can wish all you want, and you can prattle on about how
much better open source stuff is, but the real world is Windoze/Office.
Most of us don't have the luxury of hiding in our hole and pretending that
the outside world doesn't exist.

Even if we can afford/control another box, most of us also have physical
space limitations. I only have room for just so many keyboards on my desk,
and it is a major pain in the butt to have to walk around to another desk to
get to the Linux console. (Yeah, I probably have more space than most).

I run X sessions from Cygwin on a couple of Windoze machines, and it works
quite well. Earlier in the thread there was a mention about windows
behaving weird under Windows, but I haven't seen that. Indeed, if the X
implementation is anywhere close to correct, you shouldn't see that.

But it is a huge convenience to have both the Linux *and* Windoze tools at
my fingertips.

We have a mix of Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc machines at my home
and office. When it comes to outstanding convenience and price ( free! )
nothing beats VNC. Much, much faster than X, multi-platform, and you
can even issue a 3-finger-salute to a remote Windows box,
when necessary. Heck, I've controlled both Windows and Unix boxes
with it from my Palm, when I was too lazy to walk to over to my laptop. ;-)

Particularly when you run the Xvnc server on a Linux box, the
interface is all-but-indistinguishable from running X locally, no matter
what machine you're actually sitting at.

- Rich

"Here to there" wrote in message
. ..
We have a mix of Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc machines at my home
and office. When it comes to outstanding convenience and price ( free! )
nothing beats VNC.

Given your criteria, I'd have to agree with you. HOWEVER... I've used VNC
plenty, and there are numerous minor 'quirks' where parts of the screen
don't get updated correctly. For connecting Windows machines to other
Windows machines, the Microsoft 'Remote Desktop' facility is, in my
experience, more reliable and robust (it lets you control far more of what
gets 'stripped away' from the controlled machine, besides just the desktop
wallpaper that VNC will). (The server side is included with Windows XP for
the price of the OS, and the client is free for all platforms, including
UNIX machines.)

VNC does have some nice goodies that remote desktop doesn't -- the built-in
'web server' feature is really great. I've run some Windows machines with
both VNC and remote desktop enabled.

---Joel Kolstad