Which VNC Software Is Best?

Futurepower(R) writes "Which VNC software do you think is best, and why? There are several free programs, for example, TightVNC, RealVNC, UltraVNC, and TridiaVNC. Or, is it better to pay for VNC software, like Tridia VNC Pro or Radmin? Which is fastest, most secure, and the least hassle? Which has video resolution scaling of the remote desktop?"

Avoid radmin

[Anonymous Coward]

No idea about the others but avoid radmin at all costs. It's a security nightmare, easy to extract passwords out of and very easy to break into.

Wow..!

[ID000001]

The only VNC i have used is RealVNC, PCanywhere (Old) and Remote desktop for MS windows. I realize the best and most speedy one out of them all are actually Remote desktop that came with WindowsXP Pro and such.. I still use RealVNC for internet connection. The Java browser that does not requires software download are particularly useful. But perhaps it is time to check out the alternative... I didn't realize there are so many out there at all!

Re:tightvnc vs. real vnc

[cbreaker]

Yea, me too. It's not fantastic, being VNC after all. But it works pretty well, good video quality over a slower connection too. TightVNS is stable too.

Check out TWD Industries

[Jonah Hex]

If your looking to purchase an enterprise level solution, check out Remote Anything w/Directory Server [twd-industries.com]

Small footprint (90 KB): a single executable file, no DLLs, no drivers.
Portable so Mac, Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD versions will be available.
One-click installation+configuration allowing on-demand deployments.
Remotely invisible: impossibility to detect and attack Master/Slave*.
Transparently reach Slave PCs behind firewalls & routers with Masters*.
Auto-update Master & Slaves without interruption of service or reboot*.
Non-repudiation with RSA 2048-Bit keys + AES 128-Bit session keys*.
[*] Requires TWD Industries' Directory Server (DS).

The DS option offers database backup, multiple servers, and excellent NAT traversal and security. Controlling a slave is pretty much comparable to working with other VNC products, lots of options to speed things up, plus the configurability of the slave client is really full featured with all possible User Policy options an Admin could dream of.

Jonah Hex

ssh + X forwarding

[yuri benjamin]

In a *nix-only environment, I prefer ssh with X forwarding.
I've heard there are products that serve X over low bandwidth [nomachine.com].

tight

[michaelbuddy]

Tight VNC was pretty fast and worked well on my home network on Windows. You have to remember one is the Server and one is the viewer. Tight even will take down your desktop wallpaper automatically in order to save bandwidth. that was a nice feature built in.

Before you try to control your home computer from somewhere else, make sure you know how to configure your router. Your ISP phone agent will love to field those vnc questions I'm sure.

Re:Fastest

[harikiri]

Something interesting I read about when I was looking for alternatives to X (even on local lan it can perform poorly). These figures are in comparison to Nomachine's NX technology [nomachine.com]:

The basic stuff is opensource. And the numbers I heard about this are pretty nice:

• 9600 Baud GSM modem link over vanilla X: Mozilla-1.6 needs 4000 roundtrips and takes 5 minutes.
• 9600 Baud GSM modem link over NX: Mozilla-1.6 needs a dozen roundtrips and takes 20 seconds.
• KDE-3.2 desktop startup over vanilla X: transfers 4.8 MByte of data.
• KDE-3.2 desktop startup over NX: transfers 35 kByte of data.

This was cut and pasted from an email I sent to workmates a while back when I heard about NX initially. These days I prefer to use RealVNC (until I get around to buying a copy of NX) to connect to my XFCE session at home from the office.

Even on what you consider a fast connection (local ethernet) I prefer VNC over X11.

NoMachine NX client

[PDXRedcat]

The best option is to use NX Serverto compress the VNC info. Then use the NX client to connect to the NX Server. This allows you security, snapiness, and best of all, one client to connect to RDP, VNC, X Windows machines. Mike

Re:UltraVNC

[fallenangel99]

I agreee. I've used UltraVNC with no problems. You can access your computer through a webpage (the best part of UltraVNC really), provided you have a dynamic dns updater (like no-ip.org). Its really hassle free. All you have to do is forward ports 5900, and you should be set.

If you are behind a college network and want to access someone's computer in there (friend, gf,etc) you can have that person run UltraVNC viewer and "invite" you.

NoMachine hands down

[Anonymous Coward]

NoMachine NX [nomachine.com] wins hands down.

You can test drive the free implementation, FreeNX, in Knoppix 3.6.

This is the best in every category listed in the origional post. I test drove it off a cable modem in the states to a dsl in Sweden and it was faster than *VNC on a 10mbit network. It is also more secure in that it runs over ssh by default. I think it may even do audio.

Recording VNC

[benow]

Slightly off topic, but I found a bug within eclipse which was more easily documented with a screen cap movie. With a bit of research, I stumbled on vncrec [sodan.org] and vnc2swf [unixuser.org] via this tutorial [linuxgazette.net]. Vncrec is excellent, producing good captures in the proprietary .vnc format, which obviously requires the viewer to have vncrec installed. Vnc2swf is perhaps a bit tricky to setup and the swf's it provides are of good quality, as shown here [benow.ca], and being flash(4) is nice and cross platform, relying on the ming libraries for encoding. I'm still researching audio mixing, but it should be possible to record in real-time to mp3 and multiplex into the output swf via vnc2swf's -soundfile param. Recording in this manner would be _great_ for complex api documentation, complex state-dependante bug reports, and other documentation applications.

Re:Obviously

[deglr6328]

Missing choice (you insensitive clods)! I only use microVNC [www.sics.se]! You know, for those times when you simply MUST remotely connect to the 8-bit microcontroller in your toaster when you're at work.

Re:VNC on Mac OS X

[TinoMNYY24]

Personally, I use VNCThing. I found Chicken of the VNC, and it crapped out on me so many times that I got rid of it. Link to VNCThing [macupdate.com]

RealVNC Spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this [giantcompany.com] web page, RealVNC is spyware, ha!

Re:NoMachine NX client

[Zardus]

I second that. I have FreeNX running on my desktop and use it as a home base for my laptop, and its amazing in terms of how responsive it is. I've connected from Starbucks to my desktop before and felt like I was sitting at the machine.

The only drawback of NX is the complete lack of docs available. Still if anyone is interested, there's a debian-centered site about NX at Kalyxo [kalyxo.org] and there's always NoMachine's site at nomachine.com [nomachine.com].

Why not dump VNC for NX?

[mikehoskins]

If you're using VNC, you probably notice how slow it is. UltraVNC/TightVNC is a big improvement over regular VNC, as well as XWindows, but they're all dog slow.

NX (by NoMachine) and FreeNX (the GPL'ed edition) are REALLY fast, on the other hand. They are 100% encrypted through SSH and can tunnel to VNC, X, and RDP....

NX will currently only host from Unix/Linux. However, there are a bunch of clients.

I made an IMMEDIATE change to FreeNX/NX after using it only once. Now, I no longer use VNC for Linux....

Re:Fastest

[beevan_jedi]

Tarantella's [tarantella.com] been around for years doing remote/ low bandwith X11 and is worth checking out too.

Re:Use Damage

[Spy Hunter]

Is this for VNC serving another running X server? Does that use polling?

Yes and yes. Being able to remotely connect to a running X session is the main reason to use VNC on X anyway; if you want a new X session you might as well just run an X server locally (excellent free X servers are now available for windows, including a java applet one and a port of XFree86 that is integrated with Windows).

IMHO X should support moving/duplicating sessions and single apps, and I believe work to that effect is progressing (slowly) on freedesktop.org. When it is complete (and combined with NX compression for slow links) it will make VNC for X mostly redundant.

Also missing FreeNX, which talks VNC

[leonbrooks]

FreeNX [kalyxo.org] is for when it absolutely, positively, has to be double the speed. (-:

The NX protocol [nomachine.com] is essentially compressed and cached X; it talks to VNC, RDP and whetever else through its own proxy.

Mandrake 10.0 RPMs are here [cyberknights.com.au] and here [cyberknights.com.au]. The SRPMs will probably rebuild fine on 10.1 or 9.2 and are here [cyberknights.com.au] and here [cyberknights.com.au].

Re:vino

[fm6]

There's a great deal of truth [bartleby.com] in what you say!

Different clients for different uses

[kabloom]

I recently posted a list of the VNC's in debian, with a description of how each one serves a different purpose to LUGOD's vox-tech mailing list. The post [lugod.org] is quoted here in full, so that you do not need to click the link, thereby slashdotting their server.

I was asked "Is there one implementation that's better than the others? Why did this piece of software fork so many times?"

And I answered as follows:

Because they're all different. Some for framebuffers, some serve differently, some compressed, some not. Read on, and I think you'll getthe idea.

(Search packages.debian.org for vnc, and you'll see all of these pop up.)

TightVNC uses JPEG or zlib to compress the data stream to optimize for lower bandwidth connections. It is under the GPL. Packages: tightvncserver, and xtightvncviewer

The default VNC viewer (packages vncserver and xvncviewer) are (c) 2002 RealVNC, and (C)1994-2000 AT&T. They are under the GPL. This seems to be
what you alien'ed.

x2vnc - use a vnc server as a second screen, so you can move the mouse between the local machine and a machine across the network that is running the vnc client.

directvnc - doesn't require x - uses libdirectfb-0.9-20. Depends on zlib and libjpeg, so it may work with tightvnc's protocol

svncviewer - depends on svgalib

x11vnc - the x11vnc server works the same way the Windows 2000 vnc server does - mirroring the physical screen over vnc

linuxvnc - "With linuxvnc you can export your currently running text sessions to any VNC client. So it can be useful, if you want to move to another computer without having to log out and if you've forgotten to attach a 'screen' session to it, or to help a distant colleague to solve a problem."

3dwm-vncclient - I think you get the picture

vnc-java - I think you know what this is. Why bother with it? Probably so you can serve yourself a vnc client over HTTP, probably.

tkvnc - a wrapper for xvncviewer

MetaVNC

[codermarc]

I prefer MetaVNC [sourceforge.net] as it is a "window aware" VNC, and allows a gnome desktop, for example, to coexist with a Windows desktop.

MetaVNC

[Sithgunner]

I haven't tried it extensively, but there's another VNC that derived from UltraVNC called MetaVNC [sourceforge.net].

You may want to check this out too.

Re:Here's the advantages of each (since noone's sa

[Nermal6693]

I miss anything?

Yes [apple.com].

Radmin

[wldkos]

Radmin is tight. When on a LAN, you can bump the settings up to 65,535 colors and change the refresh rate up to 300-400 per second, and it's great. Obviously over long distances it's better to use lesser settings, but I have been using radmin for a while and it's great with it's telnet, file transfer, shutdown, watch and full control features.

Re:Obviously

[ultranova]

Can 8-bit microcontrollers run a graphical user interface ? I mean, logically, one would be limited to 1 MB of memory, and that would be pretty little to put the application, GUI, and TCP/IP stack into...

Re:Wow..!

[jafac]

Great post.

The Citrix "saga" is one of the great untold stories of the otherwise well-known Microsoft quest for dominance.

At the time, I worked for a company whose product was just plain not at all stable on Citrix, so I became intimately familliar with Citrix back in the mid 1990's. Ironically, I'm working for a different company, and I'm supporting/developing a product for Citrix today. It's really an awesome platform, if it weren't for the onerous licensing model foisted on us by Microsoft.