Zientek, Selene wrote:
Putty.exe vs. VNC Vs. X Windows???
Would anyone have any disadvantages or advantages of the subject above? Any thoughts would be very helpful?
They are all fairly different tools. Putty is the name of a program used for SSH access - this will only give you command line (CLI) access in itself, so if you want to run a GUI app on linux you'll need something else.[1]. Putty isn't the only program you can use for this either. VNC typically lets you connect to existing sessions. Some linux distros set this up so you can do remote-assistance type access, some set it up so you get a new login screen. VNC can be pretty slow, but you probably won't notice over a LAN. X lets you start applications on the remote system and display them locally. This could be a single application, such as an xterm, or firefox, or it could be your entire window manager/desktop environment, such as GNOME or KDE, including the login screen. X is similar in concept to RDP, the MS Windows Remote Desktop Protocol, although it is very different in execution. However, you can do the same things with them - export your entire environment, or just export a single application. There are also other technologies round, such as NoMachine NX, which is fundamentally similar in concept to X, but offers better performance. And there's tools like x2x, x2vnc, and synergy, which basically let you share a mouse and keyboard between multiple systems - eg, you can set it up so that if you scroll the mouse past the left hand side of the screen, it appears on the screen to your left, and you can control it there. This is useful if you have multiple computers with a screen each, but don't want to keep changing keyboard and mouse round. The real question is, what do you want to do? If you have a windows machine at your desk and a linux machine elsewhere and you want to run a full GNOME environment, I'd really recommend using X (look for notes on setting up a windows X server and XDMCP on your linux system). If you want to remote control your parent's linux system to guide them through some task, then VNC is the only option for you, because none of the others let you remote control an existing session. And if you just want to run a CLI command on your linux system, then SSH is the simplest method [1] You can tunnel X over SSH of course, if you care about security, but you still need an X server on the local machine to do this - you can't do it with just SSH.