Remote desktop access

[Brian McKee]

On 24/08/2007, CwCrei <cwcrei at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Thanks to all the folks who have responded - useful stuff as ever... :)
>
> Steve Flynn wrote:
> >
> > Am I right in saying that VNC presents a view of the remote machine and that
> > Remote Desktop differs in that you actually log onto the remote machine
> > (kicking off any locally logged in user)?
>
> Pretty much - I prefer the VNC way of doing things. For instance, I want
> to be able to start a session on one machine, and then when I go
> downstairs to make dinner, log in from a different machine and continue
> the session, and when dinner is over, return to the first machine and
> continue where I left off. VNC appears to allow this in a much neater
> way (without terminating the first session), whereas Remote Desktop
> doesn't - it does indeed kick off the local user, and worst still, I
> appear to be unable to log in remotely until I've logged in locally, so
> I can't just power-up the WinXP box and log in remotely, which is a
> right PITA with the 'dumb' XP box we use to play MP3s etc through the
> hi-fi...

A couple of notes here - VNC can run as a separate session if you want
it to (read start it from gdm or via cmdline rather than as a Gnome or
KDE extension of the current desktop)   Used that way it's independant
of the session running 'directly' on the machine.

On the other side of the fence, the 'one user at a time' thing in
Windows XP is strictly a 'crippleware' set up by MS.  WinXP is capable
of running multiple RDP sessions, but it's disabled in the registry.
This prevents people from substituting WinXP for Win Server with
'Terminal Services' running.

You should be able to log in remotely to WinXP without logging in
locally first though - I do that all the time....

I do agree that RDP works much nicer than VNC.   I gotta try NX one
day (so many items on that darned todo list....)

Brian