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.
Remote Desktop Apps Compared
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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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.
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.
Try to use MS’s Remote Desktop instead of VNC if you can. The Remote Desktop service hooks into Windows at a much lower level than most VNC clients do, and gives vastly superior performance as a result.
NX/freeNX is a lot faster and more responsive – even usable oner a modem, they claim (haven’t tried this).
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.
One nice thing about VNC is the way you can run a client in listen mode, and then have the server initiate the connection. It’s handy for doing simple remote support for people who are behind firewals/broadband routers.
Beware of using RDP for administering winblows servers: it is surely faster than VNC, but has a lot of drawbacks wrt. stability/usability.
1 – Many apps will NOT install properly if installed via an RDP session.
2 – not easy to send CTRL-ALT-DEL to remote machine
3 – not easy to connect to remote machine in a ‘no-user-logged-on’ state, ie RDP always logs you on as windows user (eg cannot see the desktop of no-user-logged-on state)
4 – not easy to use it to monitor what locally connected user is doing
5 – VNC has a lot many more clients and servers on Unix platforms, ie moer usable in a mixed environment
Only feature of RDP that beats VNC: letting apps run and disconnecting the RDP session (the other one, i.e. integrated auth with windows is avalibale with RealVNC pro).
Just my 2C.
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding (in which case I apologise), but I was under the impression that another advantage of RDP is that multiple users can be logged on to the same machine simultaneously, each having their own desktop.
Is this something that can be done with VNC, as a matter of interest?
2) Use Control-Alt-End…works every time.
“1 – Many apps will NOT install properly if installed via an RDP session.”
Even when “Connect to Console” is checked? I’m just curious…
“Only feature of RDP that beats VNC: letting apps run and disconnecting the RDP session (the other one, i.e. integrated auth with windows is avalibale with RealVNC pro).”
And sharing of printer / audio devices / drive mapping, if you need that sort of functionality. UltraVNC has a lot more features, such as file transfers, chat, etc. over RealVNC.