I started playing with some VNC programs to share my FreeBSD desktop on windows. My first objective was to keep an eye on my various projects from my windows laptop from around the house. I do all my work on a FreeBSD workstation and wanted to access it from my laptop.I picked TightVNC. It is a quick and easy download and installation for windows and equally quick and easy to install the FreeBSD port.
Now comes the troubles. It was easy enough to start the server on FreeBSD. I just typed vncserver in a terminal window. Now I run the TightVNC client on windows and it connects. Now we're talking.
Well, not really, it gives me a terminal window under X. This was not even close to what I wanted. I could have accomplished that with less effort under SSH. I wanted my standard desktop session to be shared.
I was unable to get gnome which I use for my desktop to start in the VNC session. I was able to kde to start and run fine. It won't let me run Firefox, but the other browers, Mozilla, Opera and others work fine. Firefox says it is already running.
This isn't quite what I want, though gets me to a better place than using a browser under Windows. Researching things a bit it looks like TightVNC will not share my session but only create new sessions. I find a problem x11vnc that says it will do what I want.
That is also a quick and easy install under the FreeBSD ports, and just as easy to run. x11vnc in a terminal window. It warns you about not having a password and depending on your network connection you need to heed the warning.
Now I connect from my Windows system to session 0 and my desktop is there shared between the two systems. It works every well, except my laptop screen is a little smaller in resolution so there is a lot of scrolls, or rearranging of window sizes.
