>hi thanks for the information. > >What I mean here is if I leave my office PC connected >to the VNC server and all the application runnings on >my PC and then connect to the same VNC server from >home PC by logging in with the same uid, then how I >can get a similar desktop on my home PC with the same >applications running ? How VNC maintains the desktop >information on per user basis ? >So to put in a simple way, does VNC re-associated my >second login from home with the fist login so that I >get the same desktop at home ? But I couldn't get the >code for this in the XVNC code base. If anyone has >more information on this, please let me know
For VNC servers other than UNIX servers you just get whatever is on the screen, no "per user" setup like Terminal Server/Winframe/Metaframe or UNIX. UNIX has it's own per user settings that are integrated into all UNIX machines and Xservers. All user settings are saved in that user's home directory (locally or on a remote server). <soapbox on> This is one of the major differences between a "PC" (be it a Macintosh, MS Windows, OS2, etc) and a "Workstations" (generally UNIX/Linux, VMS, etc). All workstations are inherently multiuser, the have a strong concept of users, that goes from the filesystem to the kernel, and which includes "user" settings and a user home directory. In most cases a normal user cannot change any system settings, or affect other user's settings. Also workstations can integrate a network into their core "being", particularly UNIX/Linux. This manifest itself in how it deals with remote storage in particular, UNIX doesn't care if your data is local or remote, to a normal user it is all the same, it would, on a PC, all be on the "C" drive, you can boot and run a fully functional workstation with all sorts of special applications available that only has a basic OS load on it (dataless client) or even that has no local disk drives as all (diskless client) where all the processing is done locally but all disk access is over the network. In addition remote access, both command line and graphical, is very advanced. Xterms have been around for a long time that allow you to bring up a full UNIX graphical display (an Xserver) across a network, or you can just bring up a single application. A single UNIX server can be running many different applications for many different people, some local, some remote, without missing a beat or every having one user step on another(other than slowing down when resources get tight). <soapbox off> So under UNIX the "normal" graphical display takes care of the "per user" settings. The rest is just about how VNC works. Sessions started manually or through some method OTHER THAN inetd connections will stay around until they are manually killed. If you start up a session on display #2, then go away, go to another computer, go home, take a sabbatical, etc, and then connect, from anywhere, to display #2 (assuming the box hasn't rebooted or the administrator killed you off), you will get the same session, it isn't restarted, it never went away. That is the great thing about VNC, it continues running even when you are not there. Say you start a big process that will take days to complete, you start up a VNC server, connect to it and start up the process. Then you disconnect, on a normal X session, or even Terminal Server/Winframe/Metaframe, the processes will die (TS etc will die after the session timeout is reached). You can then, with VNC, pop back in after a while and check on it, it will continue to grind away. If you have a server that uses the inetd option (you connect and it autostarts you a session), it will die after you disconnect as Inetd sessions are set to act more like a normal Xterminal session. -- -------------- David A. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The box said: "Needs Windows 98 or better," so I bought a Macintosh. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the line: 'unsubscribe vnc-list' in the message BODY See also: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/intouch.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------
