Free remote desktop utilities?

[John Prophet]

Are there any good free ones?

Is vnc the best freeby out there?

JP

[vass0922]

VNC is great!
I use realvnc from work to home and it works nicely

If you have XP Pro it comes with remote desktop that works pretty well also.

[muno]

I don't know any other free, unless you happen to have a w2k server and know how to setup terminal server.
Of all the remote programs I've tested, terminal server is fastest.
(I've tested netop, vnc, pcanywhere and some smaller apps, like remove administrator etc.)
-M

[crouse]

TightVNC
http://www.tightvnc.com/intro.html

Here you can find an enhanced version of VNC, called TightVNC, which includes a lot of new features, improvements, optimizations and bugfixes over the original VNC version, see the list of features below. Note that TightVNC is still free, cross-platform and compatible with the standard VNC. Many users agree that TightVNC is the most advanced free remote desktop package. And it's being actively developed so you can expect that TightVNC will become even better.
========

Here is a brief list of TightVNC features absent in the standard VNC.

* Local cursor handling. Cursor movements do not generate screen updates any more, remote cursor movements are processed locally by the viewer, so you do not see slow remote cursor movements behind the local cursor.
* Efficient compression algorithms. New Tight encoding is optimized for slow and medium-speed connections and thus generates much less traffic as compared to traditional VNC encodings. At the same time, TightVNC supports all the standard VNC encodings, so it can operate efficiently over fast networks, too. Thus, with TightVNC you can work remotely almost in real time in most network environments.
* Configurable compression levels. You can choose any appropriate level of compromise between compression ratios and coding speed, depending on your connection speed and processor power.
* Optional JPEG compression. If you don't care too much about perfect image quality, you can use JPEG compression which will compress color-rich screen areas much more efficiently (the image quality level is configurable too).
* Enhanced Web browser access. TightVNC includes a greatly improved Java viewer with full support for Tight encoding, local cursor feature, 24-bit color mode, and more. The Java viewer applet can be accessed via built-in HTTP server like in the standard VNC.
* Support for two passwords (full-control and read-only). The server allows or disallows remote keyboard and mouse events depending on which password was used for authentication.
* Advanced Properties dialog in WinVNC. Unlike the standard VNC, TightVNC gives you the possibility of setting a number of advanced settings directly from the WinVNC GUI, and to apply changed settings immediately. There is no need to launch regedit to set query options, connection priority, to allow loopback connections, disable HTTP server etc.
* Flexible configuration options. Unlike the standard VNC, TightVNC allows you to choose arbitrary port numbers for TCP/IP connections, in addition to display numbers traditionally used in VNC.
* Automatic SSH tunneling on Unix. The Unix version of TightVNC viewer can tunnel connections via SSH automatically using a local SSH/OpenSSH client installation (provided that an SSH/OpenSSH server is running on the server as well).

[nukes]

Yeah, TightVNC. I was also interested in RealVNC, as it supposedly lets you run it on a framebuffer console, however I couldn't get that working.
XFree86 has to have the best way of doing it though! X11 over a network rocks! I don't think you can export windows programs out though.

[jkrohn]

You can export windows programs with an application server. We do it in all the labs at the university

Jkrohn

[PresterJohn]

tightvnc is the way to go on the freeware side.

for commercial software...i use netop.