Vnc window linux

TridiaVNC 1.5

In these days of tight IT budgets, knowing that you can find a useful free product like TridiaVNC online is a comfort. But though you get more than you paid for, the program is not yet at the level of the best fee-based products.

Open-source VNC, short for virtual network computing, began as a research experiment at AT&T Laboratories in 1994. As with Linux, there are a variety of VNC distributions. Tridia took the VNC code, refined the application, added some enhancements, and created documentation. At present, any contributed enhancements must pass rigorous tests before being certified and distributed by Tridia.

The simple setup installs the Tridia-VNC server, which is the host application, and a viewer program, which is the guest software. You configure the server application using a properties window that lets you adjust the security options, such as disabling the remote keyboard and accepting socket connections. TridiaVNC works only over TCP/ IP and assumes you already have a connection between the host and guest.

TridiaVNC's most serious flaw is poor security. First, the security is limited to a user-defined random-challenge phrase. Once connected, TridiaVNC sends the data between the PCs unencrypted, making it potentially visible to anyone with access to the network. If you need a secure connection, you have to tunnel the VNC protocol through a secure channel, such as SSH.

The viewer is a simple dialog box that you use to connect to a host and set options, such as pixel encoding, compression, and display settings. The options are somewhat limited but cover the basics. For example, the display options let you set the color depth to 8-bit for improved performance (the default is 32-bit) and select a view mode, including full-screen and custom-scale modes.

Over high-speed connections, Tridia-VNC's performance was adequate, but it worked very poorly on dial-up connections. In fact, TridiaVNC yielded worse performance at 8-bit color than some products did at 32-bit color.

Something we did like: TridiaVNC's viewer application is a mere 280K, small enough for mailing to anyone you want to grant access to. And since TridiaVNC permits multiple simultaneous connections, you can send the viewer to a group of people and let them connect to your desktop for a presentation or demo.

Another of TridiaVNC's strengths is its extensive offering of cross-platform compatibilities, including support for Apple Macintosh, HP Unix, IBM AIX, Linux, and Sun Solaris.

By itself, TridiaVNC is limited in features and security. But because VNC is open source, lots of useful add-onsmany of which are free downloadsmake TridiaVNC extremely flexible. There is, for example, a VNC manager that finds VNC hosts running on your network, a policy editor, a batch file installer, and a patch for dual-monitor support.

Tridia Corp. also offers a retail version, TridiaVNC Pro. At $49 per PC, the Pro version is affordable and resolves some of the problems in the free version: It supports Windows NT user authentication and SSL encryption. TridiaVNC Pro also adds a simple interface that lets you perform a complete enterprise installation and change the access port number.