[lug] advice on meeting software

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Friday 11 July 2003 09:37 am, pjr at ucar.edu wrote:

> I am looking for an alternative to M$oft netmeeting. What my group
> needs is to allow (5-10) people at remote sites (all on a high speed
> network) logged into a variety of platforms (linux, Mac, Windows, etc)
> to "look over our shoulder" at stuff that is being displayed in a
> conference room on a projector. The display that everybody will be
> looking at will usually be from a windows2000 machine.  Most of the
> time he will be clicking rapidly through URLs on a browser, although
> there will also be situations where we are displaying postscript, or
> running word or powerpoint (and occasionally their non-M$ analogues I
> hope). Audio is not so critical as we can hook them up to a
> speakerphone with a conference call if the software doesnt support
> audio. Many of the remote users are novices, who dont often deal with
> installing complex pieces of software.

> At the moment, I am inclined to try for realVNC, if only because the
> documentation made the most sense to me. It looks like the remote
> users may even be able to click on a URL and download some Java code
> that will get them going without much fuss.
>
> So here are my questions:
>
> 1) Are there other programs out there more suited to my needs that I
>    should be aware of?
> 2) is VNC the way to go?
> 3) is realVNC the optimal variant for my needs?

My experience is that VNC tends to be slow on Windows boxes.  People tell 
me that that shows a misconfiguration, but I see it often so either it is 
easy to get wrong, or a deeper problem than that.

Windows prefers Remote Desktop which is basically a Windows version of VNC.  
There is a linux client named rdesktop, that seems to work well.  

Michael