Networking with X

[damaged justice <frogfarm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ted: I've tried X-Win32 also and found it usable, but not fun, especially at
that price. VNC, referenced here in the past as well as again recently at
linuxtoday.com (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/index.html), is both free
and just what the doctor ordered for the vast majority of casual and not-so-
casual users. Think PC-Anywhere, but cross platform; you can run multiple
virtual servers on one Unix box that don't use the video card (even forcing
them to resolutions and color depths the server's card doesn't support, as
long as the client machines you connect with can support it -- although you
likely want to restrict color depth to 8-bit to keep bandwidth usage low).  It
even works rather well over a fast modem connection, at least as well as
PC-Anywhere ever did, and you can tunnel its connections through ssh for added
security beyond the simple password/response challenge. There are client and
server binaries for many platforms that all work well together (imagine
controlling an NT machine from a Palm Pilot!), and I recently compiled the
viewer on an OpenBSD machine and it worked "straight out of the box." There's
even a viewer implemented in Java so you can use a Java-enabled web browser to
control the server, although its performance is doggy even on good hardware. 

If after trying VNC you still find yourself needing "real X", here's what I've
found for non-Linux machines (since I assume if you want a great X workstation
you'll just be using some form *nix):

X-Win32 (http://www.starnet.com/product.htm). Two hour demo available; the
licenses are US200.00 (ack! not the 120 you mentioned, Ted, but I'm sure this
is the same product...they have a Win 3.1 and Win95 version.)

XAppeal ( http://www.xtreme.it/xappeal/). For DOS <evil grin>. I've used the
demo, and if you need (or want) a DOS X box, this'll do the job admirably; I
got great performance on a 486/33 with 16Mb RAM and a generic SVGA card. The
trial version limits you to 8 TCP connections and to thirty days evaluation;
the full version comes in regular and "lite", the latter of which uses an
unaccelerated server and limits you to 16 TCP connections (so you can have up
to 15 windows open). The pricing scheme is all in lira since the site is in
Italy; see http://www.xtreme.it/ftp/pub/xappeal/pricing.txt to figure it out.

MiX (http://www.microimages.com/mix/). For Win32 and Macintosh. The Macintish
version is FREE (a subtle grin to Jamie); the Windows trial version is only
good for 15 days, but only costs US25.00, which makes it far more competitive
than Starnet's product for most people.

That said, VNC is quite sufficient for the vast majority of situations I've
run across.

-ian