Charles,

  I use VNC on Solaris all the time.  Under Unix, the VNC server is
actually a modified X server that has a "fake" video device driver.  The
session is independant of the console X display, and is persistent.  I can
connect from home, start a program, disconnect, drive to work, connect to
my localhost with the Solaris client, and resume as a "session within a
session".  On PC's it's a little more complicated, and doesn't always work
as well.  Basicly, it steals images from the video driver, and shims in to
the keyboard & mouse drivers.  There's only one session on the system, and
it's shared between the local console, and the remote vncviewer.  (This in
itself can be amusing...)

  It can be used over a 56k connection, and if memory serves, it's usually
faster than raw X.  Since this is open source code, there have been some
modifications.  One of the more interesting ones is "tight VNC" which does
some creative compression.  I haven't played with it myself, but I'm told
it makes a difference.  For the most part, I try to avoid doing graphics
intensive tasks over VNC.  I mostly stick with xterms, xemacs, and the
like.  Netscape will work, and will be much, much faster that xhosting it
back to Exceed, but it's still not very useable.

Good luck,

Rob
Livermore, CA

__________________________________________________________

Public Seismic Network Mailing List (PSN-L)