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VIRTUAL NETWORK COMPUTING
Control your computer remotely using PalmVNC
By Stephen Vance
Have you ever wanted to control your computers over the Internet? Perhaps you want to administer your server while traveling. Maybe you need to give technical support to your co-workers around the world. Perhaps you want to demonstrate your software or give a presentation to customers via a teleconference.
If you come from a UNIX background, you have this capability through remote login or the X Window System. There are commercial products like pcAnywhere (at http://www.symantec.com/pcanywhere/) that serve this purpose for Windows. How would you like to do all of this with your Palm OS handheld regardless of the operating system on the computer you want to control?
"Many places that require property passes or have severe restrictions on laptops will conveniently ignore your handheld."
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If any of the above appeals to you, then you should consider VNC (Virtual Network Computing) from the AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, UK (at http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/) and the PalmVNC client from Harakan Software (at http://www.btinternet.com/~harakan/PalmVNC/). And by the way, it all comes for free, although you should understand the GNU Public License and how it applies to your usage.
How it works
The instance of VNC running on your "remote" computer is called the "VNC server." This is intuitive to you unless you come from a UNIX background where the X server is the software running on your local computer.
VNC has a different program, called the "VNC viewer" that runs on your local computer. You'll interact with the VNC viewer to control the remote computer.
In general, the VNC server provides a platform-independent way to remotely control another computer. The VNC server works a little differently depending on what operating system it's running on. When the server runs on UNIX, it shows you a self-contained set of windows that are independent of what is shown on the system console. When the remote computer runs Windows, it shows you the same screen that someone sitting at the PCs keyboard would see.
Regardless of the remote operating system, the viewer and client talk by exchanging optimized and compressed portions of an image of the screen being controlled. The viewer sends keyboard input and mouse clicks to the server, and the server sends pictures of chunks of the screen back.
You can find much more detail, including the source code, at the VNC home page.
Setting up the server
Since we are specifically looking toward PalmVNC, I recommend that you download the server from the PalmVNC Web site instead of the VNC home page. PalmVNC has a useful feature that requires the scaling extensions in the Harakan version of the server. As of this writing, the latest version of the VNC server with the scaling extensions is 3.3.3r7 while the latest version of the VNC server is 3.3.3r9. However, for PalmVNC, you'll prefer the scaling extensions.
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