Together with sharing files over a network, being able to control another computer remotely is particularly appealing to users with their own networks - especially when printers, scanners and other gadgets are connected to the alien machine. RISC OS has a number of applications to achieve this and while each are very similar, they have their own individual features that make them stand out in different ways.
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Member since:2005-07-13
The basic VNC is fairly slow, because has to be compatible with quite few platforms, so it uses purely image transmission to draw the desktop.
Using MS Windows, you will find better performance using UltraVNC, that has available a native driver that streamlines some operations with directives, much like MS own Remote Desktop.
But for some basic maintenance operations, VNC is quite usable.
Member since:2005-08-22
Member since:2005-10-06
Member since:2005-07-19
While I can't vouch for the speed of NX over a modem (I can't even remember what a modem looks like ;-) I can vouch for the speed over broadband (with about a 128K upload) -- it's _fast_! If there was ever a remote control app that could be compared to Microsoft Terminal Services, this is it.
VNC sucks for Terminal Services (not just single user remote control). It's a royal pain to even make it work as a terminal server (if you have to set it up yourself), and then when you finally do get it working, it really wasn't worth it. It's slow, and has far fewer options that NX / TS. It's really not very good for anything that is not on a LAN.
This is my personal experience. YMMV.
NX really isn't very expensive (http://www.nomachine.com/store.php) and it's even free if you want to set up FreeNX on the server (which I have done on my Ubuntu Breezy server). The client is free.
Member since:
2005-10-12
I've played with VNC and its flavours, to have two machines/one monitor, and embarrassingly, before trying it, had even suggested it to other people, but the issue was the performance. Very perceptible lags. This was not on particularly slow machines either, nor were the apps highly graphical. In the end I went back to a cheap kvm, which works just fine.
Probably if you are doing remote maintenance, tutorials, there's nothing better. I had wanted to suggest it to a photographer to run his windows machine from his mac, while running the windows machine in batch mode. Performance was too irritatingly slow even there for it to be a proper solution.