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Peter Triggs
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Gone Fishin, Canada
Jan 2000 time: 05:17
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Locutus,
What's VNC?
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Locutus
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ACS CTP1/2 Manager & Civ4 Co-Manager
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Hengelo, The Netherlands
Nov 1999 time: 06:17
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VNC is the coolest program ever made (well, maybe not, but it's still pretty darn cool) It's basically a remote desktop utility: it allows to to access your desktop from a different computer. When the client (FE from a computer at work or school) is logged in on the server (FE on your home computer), your client screen looks exactly the way your screen looks when you're actually sitting behind the server pc, even the cursor movements are tracked (in fact, it is actually quite amusing to see a computer being used via VNC when noone's sitting in front of it - it's alive! ). This is very useful for accessing files and running programs that you don't have available on the PC you're currently working on. Of course, when you only want access to your files, you could simply install an FTP server as well but actually having your desktop available can be very useful and setting up an FTP client and making all your files accessible from it (while still being safe from hackers) can be a pain. If you actually want to run programs from your home computer, VNC is the only way.
The only disadvantage of VNC is that accessing your desktop over a network requires huge amounts of data to be transported so it can be a bit slow (especially on slow networks). Because of the huge amounts of data and the critical timing involved, it doesn't work at all with very demanding applications such as video and directx-dependent programs (i.e. games), no matter how fast your network. A great advantage OTOH is that it's platform independent, so you can just as easily access a Mac from a Windows PC as you can access another Windows PC. But by far the best thing about VNC is that the client is less than 200k large and doesn't have to be installed, so you can run it on virtually any system (and the server doesn't need much either, I think that even for Windows a 486 would suffice).
See the official VNC website for more info and to download the official version. However, if you plan on actually using this program, I advise you to download the enhanced version, TightVNC, as it tends to be much faster, especially on slow networks (but on fast networks as well).
My friends who live on campus have been using VNC for years but I only started using it a few days ago as it I'm usually on Uni all day and am therefore required to have my home computer online all day (which, at 3 (Euro)cent a minute, is not exactly cheap). My cable subscription has a flat fee so I can now finally start to take advantage of it 
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