display sharing

[Bill Earl]

I'm in the middle of setting up something similar here at work, and yep,
VNC should work fine for this.  With Ubuntu (and every other
distribution I'm sure) there's a nice package named "vncserver" to
install on the system to be shared, and on the viewing systems they'll
want to install the "vncviewer" package.  By default VNC sessions aren't
shared, but if you start the VNC service using the switch -alwaysshared 
everyone can connect at the same time, and they can potentially run the
show.  Yes, there can be fighting over the mouse and keyboard, so that
needs to be worked out.

You can also specify the resolution of the X session that the VNC
process will serve up, and the color depth (8 bit, 24 bit, etc.).  So in
our case I'm using the following command line to start the VNC service: 

vncserver -alwaysshared -geometry 1024x768 -depth 32

On the client systems they'll just start the viewer with the command
"vncviewer" and it pops up a box to enter the ip address or system name
of the system to be viewed.  Note that on Linux systems VNC can serve up
more than one desktop at a time, so they'll need to specify which vnc
instance they'll connect to by adding a colon and a number.  If you're
just running one VNC session on a system at 192.168.100.99 they would
point the viewer at 192.168.100.99:1  

The one thing I'm still fiddling with is how to start a vnc server at
boot time.  It takes on the profile of the person who runs the vncserver
command, and I don't want root running an X session.  It works okay to
connect by SSH and run vncserver, but it'd just be slightly handier to
have it already available.

Bill


Dazed_75 wrote:
> What is the best way for about 5 people to be able to see the same
> display (desktop, window, or terminal) with each sitting at their own
> laptop.  All will be connected to the same LAN although some may be
> wired and others wireless.  All will be running Ubuntu.  Although
> usually one of the people will be leading the
> demonstration/discussion, it might be handy if one of the others could
> step in and be the active controller.  We were thinking we read
> somewhere that VNC could be used like this in a group but are not
> sure.  Any suggestions?
>
>