The original VNC was created at the Olivetti and Oracle Research Labs in Cambridge, England. The software allowed a desktop on one computer to be used by others, usually providing Windows-users with access to applications running on Unix machines — a panacea for those cross-platform blues. VNC became so popular that Olivetti released it as free software licensed under the GPL. When ATT acquired Olivetti in 1999, the name of the labs was changed to the ATT Laboratories at Cambridge.

Constantin Kaplinski, a Russian teaching assistant at Tomsk Polytechnic Institute in Russia, and his team of TightVNC developers have enhanced the original VNC in a number of ways to make it faster, more flexible, and more secure. There are full versions of TightVNC for both Windows and Unix. If you're using a Mac, you can try the Java version, but only the viewer (client) is available in Java. TightVNC is licensed under the GPL, and the source code is available for download from the Web site.

I was a little hesitant to try TightVNC — not just because I had never used VNC, but also because I was pretty sure that the installation and configuration was going to be a real chore. Not to worry; that definitely is not the case. If you're running Red Hat 7.x or later, there are RPMS available to make installation a breeze. All in all, TightVNC was as easy to configure and use as it was to install, even when I opted for extra privacy by using a secure tunnel between Susan's machine and mine. Here's how I did it.

[ Read more ]

Related items

• Software: TightVNC