Dumb question about headless & Nebraska

Stephen Pair spair at advantive.com
Mon Apr 2 19:48:02 UTC 2001


Also, I would not recommend the VNC server on Windows...it doesn't catch all
of the updates and it's very difficult to operate Squeak.  The X based VNC
server on the other hand seems to work very well with Squeak (at least it
does on Linux).

To be fair, this is probably due to the graphics architecture (or lack
thereof) of Windows (not VNC itself) and the unreliable way of hooking into
the graphics subsystem (to do it reliably, you probably need to build your
own implementation of the GDI libraries (ick!)...I think Citrix Winframe
does exactly that).  My suspicion is that a similar situation exists on Mac.
With X windows, you have a guaranteed mechanism for receiving all graphics
updates.

- Stephen

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Guzdial [mailto:guzdial at cc.gatech.edu]
> Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 2:51 PM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Subject: Re: Dumb question about headless & Nebraska
>
>
> We've tried this with our servers, and we find VNC support on Macs
> (servers and clients) to be pretty buggy.  The same client worked
> fine on one PowerMac, but not on the next.  Some of our mac servers
> worked as VNC servers, some only showed part of a screen.  We gave up.
>
> Mark
>
> >I have run Squeak over VNC.  As far as I can tell, as long as
> >Morphic doesn't change any bits on-screen, it doesn't generate
> >any traffic and it doesn't matter how much updating it does
> >internally.
> >
> >You may find the encoder at http://www.tightvnc.org/
> >helpful: it compresses better and uses less CPU to do so.
> >It falls back on regular VNC if needed.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >Thomas.
> >
> >On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 10:23:56AM -0500, Les Tyrrell wrote:
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: Kevin Fisher <kgf at golden.net>
> > > To: <squeak at cs.uiuc.edu>
> > > Sent: Monday, April 02, 2001 7:19 AM
> > > Subject: Dumb question about headless & Nebraska
> > >
> > >
> > > > Hi:
> > > >
> > > > This is probably a dumb question but...is it possible to set up
> >a headless
> > > > Squeak that runs a Nebraska server?  I was thinking about
> >running a headless
> > > > Swiki server and being able to use Nebraska to administer it
> >would be kinda
> > > > cool. :)
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > > If not, and you have the bandwidth to support it, give VNC a
> try.  VNC used
> > > to be called a frame-buffer protocol, and for things that don't
> >update their
> > > contents frequently it is usable even over relatively slow
> >connections.  But I
> > > believe
> > > that Morphic may have enough updates going on in the
> background that this
> > > approach
> > > would be unusable over a slow connection.  It's easy enough to
> >find out, anyway.
> > >
> > > For the more ambitious, try implementing the VNC server
> protocol in Squeak.
> > >
> > > - les
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
>
> --------------------------
> Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA
> 30332-0280
> Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
> Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
> (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html
>





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