single linux box on dsl?

[Jeremy Brown]

William Hooper wrote:

>Jeremy Brown said:
>  
>
>>Benjamin J. Weiss wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I'm curious why anybody would want to do X forwarding when it seems to me
>>>that VNC would be faster and easier, not to mention more robust (if the
>>>network connection dies, the session is still there on the server,
>>>waiting
>>>for me).
>>>
>>>Am I missing something?  Is X forwarding better than VNC in some way?
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>VNC requires root access on the server to set up.
>>    
>>
>
>I don't see any reason why it would.  It doesn't use any privledged ports.
>  
>
Yeah, seconds after I fired off that last email I started thinking, 
"wait, I'm not sure that's true".  For some reason I thought it had to 
start X with an alternate configuration or something, which required 
root access.  But I may be wrong.

>>VNC is also limited
>>to one user at a time.
>>    
>>
>
>Huh?  Multiple users can look at the same VNC session and multiple VNC
>sessions can be started on a single machine.
>  
>
That's true...I guess I should have said "each VNC session can only do 
one thing at a time".  In order for N users to have separate VNC access 
to a machine, you'd have to start at least N VNC servers on it, and 
assign ports/passwords to each user.  This quickly ends up being a 
hassle in my opinion, since the equivalent X forwarding setup requires 
almost zero configuration.

Also, AFAIK each VNC server requires a completely separate running 
instance of X, which can gobble up your memory quickly.  Again, the 
equivalent X forwarding setup only takes as much memory as the client 
application needs.

Jeremy