Desktop sharing under X

The idea behind buying two identical TFTs was, once, that I would have a dual screen setup. Currently however, one of those is in use by my server, which has functioned as my primary desktop machine for a pretty while now. So I've been playing with the idea to keep my server only as a machine for remote logins and give my freshly reanimated desktop machine back its second screen. That turned out to be harder than I thought.

And that all because I still wanted to be able to access my X session once I would disconnect the display. Had I stuck with e-mail in mutt and instant messaging in BitlBee, that would all not be necessary. But I've become quite used to my KDE environment and it is just a bit too much hassle to switch back to console-only applications. Hence, I've tried various ways of connecting to my existing X session.

For some reason, the built-in KDE desktop sharing application krfb does not work well (this seems to be a known bug, although I have no SMP machine), so that option was out. Then I looked at RealVNC's solution called x0vncserver. Granted, its documentation says that it is a bit inefficient, but at least it was worth a try. Alas, the only message I got while trying was "Aborted", so, back to the drawing board it was. My final try was to install the vnc.so module that is packed along with RealVNC. Lo and behold, it works, and I can use krdc jsut as fine with it, although it still feels a little sluggish over my local 100 Mbit connection.

Of course, a better idea might be to skip the remote desktop connection story altogether and just run KMail, Kopete, and friends locally on my desktop. Using my server purely for fileserving and routing purposes might just be better suited as well. Still, at least I now know that setting up such a remote connection is really possible, and for small tasks it might actually work quite well.