#13 No display mode for better performance with win2vnc

[Stephen Chin]

Just a quick enhancement request.

It would be cool to have an option to turn off the
display entirely (I know someone hacked x0rfbserver to
do this). That way you can use win2vnc to control a
machine running xf4vnc without any performance hit.

As it stands now, though, the performance isn't half
bad. Especially when compared to krfb (which also has
a similar feature to work with display 0, but is
horribly slow).

You should also talk to the guy who wrote win2vnc and
get a link off his site. I think x0rfbserver is dead,
so xf4vnc is a great replacement.

[Alan Hourihane]

Logged In: YES
user_id=2372

I'm not sure what you mean by 'turn off the display entirely'.

Can you elaborate ?

[Stephen Chin]

Logged In: YES
user_id=532847

The purpose of win2vnc is to be able to control two or more
computers that are side-by-side with a single input device.
When you roll the mouse off the edge of the screen on the
main computer, your cursor "magically" appears on the other
machine and you can now click and type as if your input
devices were connected directly to that machine.

It isn't really "magic". What happens is that it uses the
vnc control protocol to send mouse and keyboard events to
the remote machine. Since both machines are side-by-side,
there is no need to actually view the vnc session, you just
turn your head and look at the monitor of the machine being
controlled.

Since vnc is a multi-platform protocol, this makes it
possible to use win2vnc (or x2vnc) to control any type of
machine. It works out-of-the-box against windows machines
running realvnc, because windows always uses the main
display for the vnc session. Running against a unix machine
is more difficult, because most vnc servers create new
displays for vnc sessions (and to achieve the proper effect
you want to control the display being used on the console).

That is where xf4vnc comes in. Since it supports broadcast
and control of display 0, it complements win2vnc well. The
only drawback is a slight slowdown on the machine being
controlled due to the compression and transmission of the
image. It would be nice to have an option to put xf4vnc in
a "control-only" mode where no graphics information is sent
back to the client.

Hope this description helps.

[Alan Hourihane]

Logged In: YES
user_id=2372

Actually, x2vnc came from a program called x2x which uses
the XTEST extension. Now if win2vnc is based off of x2vnc,
what I think should really be done is a program created called
win2x which should use the XTEST extension. That would be
a better tool.

I'm closing this though, as it should really be added to the
RFE section on SourceForge.