John R Pierce wrote, On 10/27/2009 02:42 AM:
GUI over a 28k dialup? ouch. there's no network connection at this remote site? its going to be really really slow over dialup. I'm talking minutes to paint a screen at 2-3kbyte/sec serial speeds (a 1280x1024 24bit desktop is 3.6 million bytes). use a really simple theme on the desktop with no shaded borders, no backgroun graphics ('wallpaper'), etc. Sending a single full screen 1280x1024 photographic image could take a half hour or more.
You Kids and your full desktop hosted back... back in the day I worked with individual applications across a 9.6kbps connection, and yes it was slow and had a bit of lag, but it worked well enough to use xemacs and mozilla across. Also when hosting the application back, you are not transferring all the pixels, but only the X commands to draw them, so unless you are running a picture editor/viewer (such as gimp) then a lot less than your 3.6 million bytes per 1280X1024x24bit will be used. Granted, running the gimp full screen across such a link would be a near insane thing.
I was much happier when I discovered `ssh -C` (in combination with X or Y), to host the apps back. There was still a little lag but overall it was _much_ snappier.
I have yet to use X across a vnc or with freenx so I can't comment on how they compare to `ssh -C`.