i started playing with VNC at work today.
like all the pcs given out by the corp it people, i have an nt box in my office -- this one is nt4 sp5, and since all i use it for is bloatus notes, mozilla, teraterm/ssh and xwin32 (since i actually own a license for it from before the cygwin X stuff was out), it is fairly stable.
my lab machine is a dell running red hat 7.1 (by this time unrecognizably customized), and if i'm not on its console, i'm working on it remotely from my office. this machine is next to the mac that runs the imaging system; that mac must run os9 because of the proprietary software that runs on it (don't even get me started).
since all the email in the company is over lotus notes, i have to do something to keep from running back and forth to my office. a while back i discovered that wine runs notes passably well, so i've been doing that.
however, there are doubtless licensing issues with copying all the files to another machine, and the preferences and local mail files are getting out of sync, and wine screws up all my X keybindings somehow...
so i tried VNC.
amazingly enough, notes under wine is actually *faster* and more usable than notes under vnc.
and it disregards my desktop wallpaper (windows' hospital green makes me feel ill)... and you can't resize the desktop (so i spent all my time scrolling around because i was using a 1600x1200 desktop from a 1024x768 one), and i can't screenlock the office pc and still get in via vnc.
using vnc is like swimming in treacle, but not so messy.
now, having said all that, vnc is pretty damned cool... but i still prefer the X works over a network.
now, was that a geek tirade or what?
Tue Feb 26 19:53:13 EST 2002