I need a VNC client for Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu repository has 5 or 6, and I really have no idea how to distinguish them. Normally I’d hit up Social Source Commons, but I don’t see any Linux VNC clients there.
It looks like the difference between the options has to do with the display protocol. DirectVNC uses the “remote framebuffer protocol” while xVNC4Viewer uses X and sVNC “provides a client for SVGA.”
I’m lost. The package descriptions aren’t really helping:
DirectVNC is a client implementing the remote framebuffer protocol (rfb) which is used by VNC servers. If a VNC server is running on a machine you can connect to it using this client and have the contents of its display shown on your screen. Keyboard and mouse events are sent to the server, so you can basically control a VNC server remotely.
xVNC4Viewer: VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing `desktop’ environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.
It is implemented in a client/server model. This package provides a vnc client for X, with this you can connect to a vnc server somewhere in the network and display its content in a window. There are vnc server available for X and for Win95/NT.
xvncviewer (This is just a precursor to xvnc4viewer, something about backwards compatability)
svncviewer: VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing `Desktop’ environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.
It is implemented in a client/server model. This package provides a client for SVGA, with this you can connect to a vncserver somewhere in the network and display its content on a graphic capable console. There are vncserver available for X and for Win95/NT, although the Win95/NT server may not work with svgalib viewer due to missing palette handling.
xtightvncviewer: VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing `desktop’ environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.
It is implemented in a client/server model. This package provides a client for X, with this you can connect to a vncserver somewhere in the network and display its content in a window. There are vncserver available for X and for Win95/NT.
The difference between the xtightvncviewer and the normal vncviewer is the data encoding, optimized for low bandwidth connections. If the client do not support jpeg or zlib encoding it can use the default one. Later versions of xvncviewer (> 3.3.3r2) support a new automatic encoding that should be equally good as the tightvnc encoding.
Unless you’re at a machine without X Windows, don’t bother with svncviewer: it (or tools like it) are usually used in things like embedded devices, where full X11 overhead isn’t feasible. svncviewer has also been orphaned and abandoned by debian.
You also don’t want to go with the older xvncviewer, which is the older version 3.
I know nothing about (and have never tried) DirectVNC.
I’d go with xtightvncviewer or xvnc4viewer. They’ve both worked fine for me in the past. If you’re using GNOME and you want a pretty GUI wrapper around these things instead of launching them from the shell, you might also prefer to use vinagre or tsclient.
I will confess my affection for pretty things, in general.
Ah, looking up DirectVNC, it sounds like it is similar to svncviewer: it’s for systems without X (that’s what they mean by “using the framebuffer”). It depends on libdirectfb, which is described as:
So you don’t want that either for your standard GNU/Linux desktop. (though it’s a pretty cool idea for low-power devices that don’t want to be responsible for X itself but still have a shiny display).
I’ll second what dkg said – xtightvncviewer is nice, and the tsclient gui is a rather pretty wrapper around all manner of remote desktop tools and is actually kind of useful
I use tsclient, since it also supports RDP and ICA. That means my tsclient drop-down (I have it on my top menubar has a list of several computers – some VNC, some Microsoft Remote Desktop, some Citrix, and I can pick from them without thinking about it. My XP work computer would have half the icons on the Quick Launch bar if there was a similar tool on Windows (that I knew of).
Thank you! I’m installing tsclient now.