TightVNC 1.2.6
Andy Boze · Information Technology and Libraries · 2002
Constantin Kaplinsky E-mail: [email protected] www.tightvnc.com Price: free System requirements: Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, or ME; Unix/Linux (various versions) You're at home, or maybe you're at conference. Wherever you are, you'd like to use that computer back in your office where your files and your software are. With TightVNC you can remotely control your office PC, or any other PC, from wherever you happen to be, as long as you have computer handy. TightVNC is one of family of products, all based upon Virtual Network Computing (VNC), which was developed at AT&T Laboratories in Cambridge, England. To quote from AT&T's Web site, VNC is a remote display system which allows you to view computing `desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from wide variety of machine architectures. What this means is that you can have PC running Windows in your office, and you can use your Macintosh at home or Linux machine at your friend's house to view and control the PC back in your office. TightVNC is available for Windows, Unix, and Java. If you use Google (www.google.com) to search for VNC, you'll quickly turn up members of the family that support other operating systems. Interestingly, there are even versions of VNC for the Palm OS and for the Pocket PC. This review refers to the Windows version, which was used on PCs running Windows NT, 2000, and XP. The installer can be downloaded from the TightVNC Web site at www.tightvnc.com. The installation is quick and uncomplicated. All you need to do is run the installer and accept all the default values that are offered. During the installation, new folder is added to the Windows Start menu. One of the items in the folder is for installing TightVNC as service. You'll want to do that if the machine is the one you want to control remotely. Installing the TightVNC service means that it is automatically loaded at every system start. That's useful in case the computer gets restarted while you are away, otherwise you wouldn't be able to connect to it until someone logs in and manually starts the TightVNC server. Of course, in order to control computer remotely, you need to have VNC installed on second one. I use TightVNC on my office and home PCs. Usually I want to connect to my office PC from home, so I keep the VNC server running on the office PC and use the viewer on the home PC to make the connection. I'm fortunate enough to have cable modem at home, so the PC there is online all the time, just like the office PC. I keep the VNC server running on my home machine in case I want to connect to it from the office. You might wonder how you can use VNC from machine that you don't own, if you're at conference, for example. I installed TightVNC on PC at recent ALA conference without any difficulties. Making connection to my office PC worked fine. However, there's an even easier way to connect to remote machine. Conveniently, TightVNC includes an HTTP server, which can be disabled if you wish. You don't actually need to have VNC installed to control remote machine--all you need is Java-enabled Web browser. Thus, using nothing more than Netscape, I was able to control my office PC from PC at an ALA conference. The only difficulty I ran into using the Web browser method was an occasional disconnection from my office PC. It was easy to reconnect and resume what I was doing exactly as I had left it. TightVNC gets its name from type of encoding it uses. The tight encoding is optimized for slower connections, making TightVNC good choice for use with dial-up modem connections. …