[ale] Free X Server for Win2k

[Joseph A Knapka]

Stephen Turner wrote:
> 
> well if vnc is slow, is there something faster?

I think if you want a cross-platform, open-source
solution, VNC is the only game in town. And it's
a pretty good game; no one seems to hate it enough
to write a replacement, anyway.

Network usage:

The standard VNC protocol (RFB) includes a
compressed image format (hextile) that's reasonably
good, bandwidth-wise, but still leaves something
to be desired.

There's also a third-party RFB encoding called "tight".
With tight encoding enabled, VNC requires pretty
low bandwidth. I don't know if tight is part of
the standard AT&T distro of VNC though; you might
need to patch and rebuild. There's a commercial
vendor that supports VNC and distributes a version
with tight built-in, but I can't remember the name;
it'll be on the VNC website somewhere.

As far as CPU usage and latency:

The VNC server on Windows is not as fast as it could
be, because it hooks into the Windows display subsystem
in a simple-but-not-very-fast way. It's possible,
as I understand it, to hook into the Windows drawing
routines at a lower level and thus build a faster
Windows VNC server, but no one has bothered to
implement this as far as I know. (But it's been
quite a while since I followed VNC development
closely.)

The Unix VNC server is extremely fast: it's
just XFree86 with the hardware graphics driver
ripped out and replaced by an RFB encoder. In
general, Unix boxes make better VNC servers
than Windows boxes (in case you have to choose
which machine to hide in the closet and which
one to keep on your desk).

Use of tight encoding will increase the CPU load
on both client and server to some degree, due to
the aggressive compression.

Cheers,

-- Joe

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