Xnest and Xvnc

[Alex Nicolaou]

"Laferriere, Bob (MED)" wrote:
> 
> How does Xnest compare to Xvnc. It appears they both do a similar thing.
> Accept client requests, write to a different display, and make Xlib
> calls to the true Xserver. Is there a benefit of using Xnest over Xvnc?

Your description describes Xnest, not Xvnc. Xnest is a sort of X-proxy
server, which talks to the "real" X server. Xvnc is the X server, which
talks in turn to clients that understand VNC's RFB protocol. Xvnc
renders the desktop internally and transmits RFB protocol updates to
(possibly multiple) RFB clients.

Xnest should perform substantially faster than vnc on operations for
which X is optimized, such as drawing text. Try timing "for i in /bin/*
; do ls /bin; done" with each. For an all-UNIX environment, the speed
might be a compelling advantage.

The beauty of VNC is that it is plenty fast enough to be usable as an
alternative to X, and the client is very small and has been ported to
platforms for which satisfactory X servers are hard to come by and
expensive. A side benefit is that the state is all on the Xvnc side and
so you can move easily from place to place and recover your session
exactly where you left it.

alex


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