Re: Can image from Laptop A display on Laptop B?

"The Hun" <thehuninla@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1151864932.559387.57160@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
1. When I'm sitting at a table with a laptop, with one or more people
who also have laptops, how do I make the information displayed on my
screen also display on the screens of the other laptops, effectively
mkaing the other laptops act as dumb terminals?

2. Assuming it's possible to have the information on my display also
display on other laptops, is it also possible for the others to be able
to take turns at controling the information? The information on the
screen may be a spread***, a text document, or other types of
software.


UltraVNC (http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/). It's free. However, you need permission on each host to install the server on the target host (so you can connect to it from a remote host to see its screen), or permission on each remote host (so you can install the client there to connect back to the target's host of whose screen you want to see). UltraVNC can use an SSL plug-in to secure your traffic between the remote and server hosts (so no one can sniff out your traffic), especially important for work if you are going across the Internet and not using a VPN. Rather than installing and using the UltraVNC client on the remote host to display the target host's screen, you can also use their Java plug-in on the remote host to use a web browser there to connect to the UltraVNC server back on the target host. That means with the Java plug-in that the remote host can be running any OS (Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS/X). If you have a firewall on the target host, you will need to configure it to permit unsolicited connects from outside to the UltraVNC server's listening port so you can connect from the remote hosts. If the target host on which the UltraVNC server is running is also using an NT-based version of Windows, you can have UltraVNC use those accounts rather than define separate ones just for UltraVNC. That is, rather than define separate logins just for UltraVNC (or using just one that you share with others so everyone knows how to get into the target host), you can have UltraVNC use the Microsoft logon accounts under Windows NT/2000/XP. In your case, you would probably install the UltraVNC client on the other laptops and configure them so they cannot do anything back on the target host that is running the UltraVNC server; i.e., the other laptops only *see* what you are doing on your laptop. I'm pretty sure all the VNC flavors let the remote client run in view-only mode. However, if you are going to let each remote control the mouse and keyboard on the target host, all those users will be battling with each other on controlling those devices on the target host, like everyone talking at once on a party line.

I've never used Remote Desktop but it is a feature of Windows XP.

The problem with all these solutions is that the screen updates have to go over the network. It's not too bad when you have a 100Mbps LAN across which you transfer the incremental screen changes, but over the Internet on your 6Mbps connection it would be too slow and jerky, and worse on a slower connection bottleneck between the two hosts. UltraVNC has a mirror driver that helps speed up the video updates (don't recall it if helped or not to reduce jerkiness on the remote host).

The more loaded is the target host that is running the UltraVNC server (to which you connect from the remote hosts), the jerkier will be the display seen on the remote hosts. The UltraVNC server process will compete for resources along with all the other processes on the target host so it can get choked in sending screen updates to the remote host. If the target host is heavily loaded (CPU and/or disk activity is high and remains that way), you will find screen updates at the remote hosts are exaspertingly jerky. After loading the UltraVNC server on the target host, you could increase its priority at the expense of the other jobs (which are probably the more critical jobs that you really need to run on that host).

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