TightVNC-1.2.8: description + notes
About VNC and TightVNC
VNC (an abbreviation for Virtual Network Computing) is a great client/server software package allowing remote network access to graphical desktops. With VNC, you may allow yourself to access your machine from everywhere provided that your machine is connected to the Internet. VNC is free (released under the GNU General Public License) and it's available on most platforms. Original VNC distribution can be obtained at the AT&T research labs site.
Here you can find enhanced version of VNC, called TightVNC (grown from the VNC Tight Encoder project), which is optimized to work over slow network connections such as low-speed modem links. While original VNC may be very slow when your connection is not fast enough, with TightVNC you can work remotely almost in real time in most environments. Besides bandwidth optimizations, TightVNC also includes many other improvements, optimizations and bugfixes over VNC. Note that TightVNC is free, cross-platform and compatible with the standard VNC.
TightVNC is a project maintained by Constantin Kaplinsky. Many other individuals and companies participated in development, testing and support.
TightVNC Features
- Local cursor handling. Cursor movements do not generate screen updates any more, remote cursor movements are processed locally by the viewer, so you do not see remote cursor pointer moving too slow behind the local cursor.
- Efficient compression algorithms. New Tight encoding is optimized for slow and medium-speed connections and thus generates much less traffic as compared to traditional VNC encodings. At the same time, TightVNC supports all the standard VNC encodings, so it can be easily configured to operate efficiently in fast network environments too.
- Configurable compression levels. You can choose any appropriate level of compromise between compression ratios and coding speed, depending on the your connection speed and processor power.
- Optional JPEG compression. If you don't care too much about perfect image quality, you can enable JPEG coder which would compress color-rich screen areas much more efficiently (and image quality level is configurable too).
- Web browser access. TightVNC includes greatly improved Java viewer with full support for Tight encoding, local cursor feature, 24-bit color mode, and more. The Java viewer applet can be accessed via built-in HTTP server as in the standard VNC.
- Operating under Unix and Windows. All new features listed above are available in both Unix and Win32 versions of TightVNC.
- Advanced Properties dialog in WinVNC. Unlike the standard VNC, TightVNC gives you a possibility to set a number of advanced settings directly from the WinVNC GUI, and to apply changed settings immediately. There is no need to launch regedit to set query options, connection priority, to allow loopback connections, disable HTTP server etc.
- Automatic SSH tunneling on Unix. Unix version of TightVNC viewer can tunnel connections via SSH automatically using local SSH or OpenSSH client installation.
- And more. A number of other improvements, performance optimizations and bugfixes, see WhatsNew and ChangeLog documents.
IRIX Notes
The following commands if placed into the ~/.vnc/xstartup file will start an Irix Interactive Desktop (IID) session.
#!/bin/sh xrdb $HOME/.Xdefaults sh /var/X11/xdm/Xsession.dt
To auto-install this package, go back and click on the respective install icon.