Remote X sessions or VNC (was:Re: Headless YellowDog)

[yellowdog-general at lists.terrasoftsolutions.com]

> > This is meant as a general question. Perhaps for my purpose 
> here, the
> > remote X solution is good, but what are the (dis)advantages 
> of remote X
> > over VNC and vice versa ? In which situations would VNC be 
> preferred or
> > the only solution, and in which situations remote X ?
> 
> The advantage of VNC in this case is that you can quit and 
> restart the viewer 
> many times and everything on the remote system stays running. 
>  Plus you have 
> the option of running multiple viewers at once or switching 
> where to do the 
> viewing from without restarting everything on the remote 
> system.  VNC will 
> probably be faster over slow links or links with a large 
> latency.  The X 
> protocol is rather verbose.

Excellent points. It is really painful to run even a simple X term over a
dialup line. Using VNC with compression it's not too bad. It's still slow,
but it's better than trying to run X! As a "For example", I have a file
server at my daughter's school that I administer. When I'm on site, none of
the machines in the classroom have X on them. I just call up the browser and
point it to the VNC server and I can run X. Kinda. I can go from room to
room and it's the same session. When I get home, I can look back at the
session and it's all still there.