Cameron Laird's personal notes on VNC
We profiled
VNC for SunWorld Online in 1999.
Rawn Shah,
for whom I have considerable respect as an author,
wrote us about the article to observe, among other
points, that "I love the product. A must-have for
any administrator of small or large networks." In
fact, one deficiency of the article is that it
doesn't make sufficiently clear how apt VNC is
for helpdesk-style operations. Part of this is
that VNC is not multi-user-friendly
in the way that WinFrame, for example, is (Keith
Ajmani wrote to emphasize the same point: "...
NT ... is inherently single user"). As
Rawn summarizes, "No real support for separate
sessions ... Also no real management tools." I
credit him also for pointing out that Wyse's
Linux-based
Xterms and WinTerms embed VNC.
Leaf recommends
"Lotus SmartCam abilities" as a useful direction for VNC
development. Phillip Lord rates VNC
"[p]ossibly
the most useful invention since the cat flap ..."
Chris Tyler introduces VNC to a Linux audience in his useful
tutorial
for Ext2, and David Bashaw does much of the same
for
32BitsOnline.com. PC Week
reviewed VNC quite favorably in its 14 June 1999 issue;
key words were "easy", "remarkable", "simple", and "flexible".
I haven't figured out yet how to link to the article.
After the year 2000
Since that first article of ours in 1999, our interest has taken
a couple of different directions:
- we've looked at VNC as a development platform in
- VNC has proliferated a commercial market in ...
- over a decade later, Cameron published
a piece on
"Webification" which focused principally on VNC
[Explain Tarentella, Citrix, ...]
[Unpack other notes about VNC installations.]
Cameron
Laird's personal notes on
VNC/claird@phaseit.net