Serving X Windows over Dial-Up?

[Brian Kelsay]

It's basically the same as using VNC.  It's doable, but slow.  You don't get as many screen 
refreshes remotely as you get when you are in front of the PC monitor.   It helps to turn off stuff 
like sliding menus, shading of mouse pointers, background images, transparent windows.   When you 
use VNC, all that is turned off by default.  There is a checkbox to turn off the background image.  
I don't know if X does this, but VNC only transmits the pixels that have changed since last 
refresh.  I'm much more familiar w/ VNC and MS terminal server than w/ remote X.  I have read that 
you can start a ssh session with a box, then remotely run X over that.

 

Brian Kelsay

>>> Leo J Mauler <w> 02/20/04 02:42AM >>>
I don't have any way of testing this question on my own (only one working
modem left), so I'll ask it here.

Has anyone else tried serving up Linux and X (ala LTSP) over a dial-up
connection?  Can you do anything X-based with it?  I'm thinking in terms
of, say, editing a document in Abiword or a spreadsheet in Gnumeric, or
reading one's E-mail using an X-based application like Evolution.  I.e.,
if that sort of thing is so slow that it is annoying, thats not "doing
anything X-based with it".

Lets assume a low-overhead desktop manager, like IceWM.