The Answer Gang

Running XDM Without a console GUI

From dwayne.bilka on Sun, 10 Sep 2000

Answered by: Ben Okopnik, Dan Wilder

Can I run xdm in the background without the console switching into the GUI? One of our RedHat 6.0 servers has a SiS620 AGP built into the motherboard, and I have not been able to figure out how to get it to work. Anyways, I don't need a GUI on the server (our servers are in the basement, my office is on the 10th floor), however I do have the occasional need to bring up the GUI. I use X-Win on NT to connect to our Solaris/Linux servers.

[Ben] Try vncserver and svncviewer/xvncviewer instead. You can run the server on your server , and connect to it from your desktop. Clients are available for just about any platform, and you can even log into it from your server machine locally (X Windows without running an X server... the mind boggles). Nice GUI, excellent clients for the Windows world (small enough to carry with you and run directly from a floppy, or you can actually use a browser (!) as a viewer).

The program itself is available under the GPL from the good folx at https://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc - there's also a very good FAQ/troubleshooting guide on the site.

[Dan] Has vnc been maintained recently?

I tried it a couple of years ago and found it terribly buggy. Broken images, crashes, the like. Good enough at the time for no more than extremely casual use.

Watched it for a year or so, no apparent maintenance work being done, gave up on it.

[Ben] The last release for Win clients was 5/26/00; Unix, 2/9/00. I used it in a business environment almost two years ago on a regular basis and found it stable and bug-free.

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in the Linux Gazette Issue 58 October 2000

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