VNC (Desktop Sharing)
VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is free software that can be used for desktop sharing among computers. You can use it to connect to a Linux computer and get a graphical login screen. You can also use it to make your Windows desktop available so that you can access it from another computer. VNC is available for Linux, for Windows, and for Mac OS X.
There are two parts to VNC: a "viewer" and a "server". The server runs on the computer whose desktop is being shared. The viewer runs on the computer that is accessing the desktop of another computer. Two slightly different versions of VNC for Windows are available from http://www.tightvnc.com/ and from http://www.realvnc.com/
There is also a free VNC viewer available for Mac OS X. It has the unfortunate name "Chicken of the VNC", but it works well. You can find its official site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/.
You can download TightVNC and Chicken of the VNC through the following download links:We have 8 Linux computers in the CS faculty labs which are running a VNC server 24 hours a day. This allows other computers to connect and get the same graphical login screen that is available when the computers are used directly in the lab. These computers are named csfac0, csfac1, ..., csfac7. They are only accessible if you are connected to the campus network. To connect to one of these computers, you must run the VNC viewer program on your computer. To get a login screen for the computer named csfac1, use the VNC client to connect to csfac1.hws.edu:1 or to csfac1.hws.edu:2 -- the first of these (:1) will give you a 1024-by-768 desktop, while the second (:2) will give a larger 1280-by-1024 desktop. You can connect to any of the other computers (csfac1, csfac2, ..., csfac7) in the same way.
If you want to use vnc from Linux, there is a VNC viewer program in the KDE menu. It is under "Internet" and is Called "Krdc (Remote Desktop Connection)". Type in the connection information as shown above. (When you first connect to a machine it will open a dialog box asking you about "using KWallet" etc. I suggest UNchecking both boxes.)
Another VNC viewer is built into the KDE desktop system. To access it most easily, enter a URL that starts with "vnc://" into the "Location" box of the Konqueror web-browser/file-manager program. For example, to open a VNC connection to csfac1, enter vnc://csfac1.hws.edu:1 into the "Location" box.
When a VNC server is run on a Windows computer, VNC viewer can access the desktop of the Windows computer from another Windows or Linux computer. For a Windows, server, the desktop will be shared. That is, both the local and the remote user will see the very same desktop. The point of doing this is to allow you to access and control your Windows desktop remotely.
Obviously, if you share your Windows desktop in this way, you will want to control access to it! To do this, you can set a password for the VNC server. (When you use VNC viewer to connect to a password-protected server, you will be asked to enter the password before you are allowed to connect.) Furthermore, you can decide whether or not a remote user will be able to use the mouse and keyboard to control your desktop. Please read the VNC server documentation before you start using it!
Note that Windows XP Professional comes with a built-in remote Windows desktop server. If you use this service on your Windows computer, you can access it under Linux through the program named rdesktop. For example, use "rdesktop mycomputer.hws.edu" on the command line to connect to the a Windows computer named mycomputer on the HWS network. You can also specify the window size, as in "rdesktop -g 1024x768 mycomputer.hws.edu" for a 1024-by-768 Windows screen size.