Forget VNC, TurboVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC, RealVNC... the good one is Tiger, TigerVNC

It seems like it was only yesterday that a team of very creative people at a joint research facility in Cambridge, UK -operated at the time by Italian firm Olivetti and US database giant Oracle (talk about strange bedfellows)- created "Virtual Network Computing" or VNC for short.

Then, over the years, the concept of a free software implementation of a "remote desktop" began to catch on (once upon a time people would buy propietary products to do this sort of thing, like "PC Anywhere" or IBM Desktop on Call, Win2You, etc, just to name a few).

Well, the problem with VNC was that while the underlying RFB protocol was very strong, some bean counter *ssholes at AT&T who first bought the reserach labs later decided they´d rather use the money more wisely and proceeded to shut down the ORL research labs in Cambridge. The Guardian lamented it here.

Over the years, people started making VNC stronger, faster, and forks of the original VNC started to appear: TightVNC, TurboVNC, UltraVNC, and finally... RealVNC.

So, fast forward to 2010... What of all flavours of VNC to use?.

My answer: none of the above.

My choice is TigerVNC.

TigerVNC is a fork of RealVNC, incorporating many of the improvements from TightVNC and better security (which on RealVNC are features in the paid/commercial version only).

See:
http://tigervnc.org

Windows and linux builds are available at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tigervnc/files/

From the site: “TigerVNC is an advanced VNC implementation. It is based on the fourth generation of VNC. TigerVNC also includes features from the TightVNC and TurboVNC projects.

This includes accelerated JPEG compression. TigerVNC supports the latest X.Org X server.”

Hope this helps...
FC

Open your Firefox profile folder from FF 3.0+

In some instances you might have to copy files to your Firefox (or SeaMonkey for that matter) web browser's "profile". The trouble is often finding that profile, as, for security reasons, the name of the folder is a string of random characters created at the time you created your "user profile".

An extension by some Japanese fellow is available, but he stopped updating it -along with much of his web page it seems- shortly after the Firefox 2.x release.


As a result, his extension refuses to install on Firefox 3.0, 3.01 and beyond. I did a quick tweak and fixed it. It works beautifully in Firefox 3.01.


Find my modded XPI extension over here.

http://fcassia.googlepages.com/open_profile_folder-1.1.5-fcassia-mo.xpi

Of course, as 99.9% of all XPI extensions, this is cross-platform and works on Windows as well as Linux.

FC