Re: [Directvnc-user] Problems and Suggestions

[Till Adam]

# Quoting Tony Godshall (address@hidden):

> Would be nice to have the web page indicate status.

It was a bit rough to keep up with the DFB folks lately, as the last
three or four versions (including what is currently in cvs) were all
incompatible to each other. I usually stick with cvs, so what is in
DirectFB cvs should mostly work with DFB cvs. Unfortunately I cannot
always react quickly to a release of DFB with a release of my own, so
things went out of sync.

> > > Second, I would really like to be able to keep gpm running.  Is there
> > > some way to make DirectFB recognize the gpm repeater device as being
> > > valid?  I assume this is a DirectFB question, but directvnc is currently
> > > the only DirectFB question, and I figured you may know the answer.
> > 
> > I have never worked with gpm myself, but as far as I can see the dfb mouse
> > driver accesses the hardware directly and conflicts with gpm. That would 
> > have
> > to be dealt with in DFB. Cant be of much help here, sorry. Have you asked on
> > the DFB list? 

The mouse issues DFB has have lately come up a few more times and I'm
hoping for a fix. I should have some more time soon, maybe I can do
something.

> 1) a way to switch vnc sessions with a keystroke (preferably
> programmable).  Evan and I obviously made the same
> assumption about how to do this easily, since I found this
> messages looking specifically for this question, which is to
> run a directvnc on each console and use ctrl-alt-F1..F6 to
> choose a directvnc session.  But for my part, a directvnc
> that manages multiple connections would also be just fine.
> 
> 2) (optional) a way to switch vnc sessions with mouse.  A
> meta-pager, if you will.

Ok, what I have come up with for now as far as how I want to do that is
this:

When you call directvnc with a --scan-network 192.168.0/24 or something
option, that network is scanned for listening server and the result is
written to a file. (Separate little perl/python script to do that,
probably.)

The contents of that file are then presented to you as choices of
servers to connect to through some kind of ui. I'll start with a simple
command line interface and hopefully someone with talent can come up
with a DFB gui along the lines of DFBSee at some point. I'd be willing
to implement the gui if someone else designs it, as I suck at that. You
would maybe be presented icons for each server which you can doubleclick
to connect to them.

A keystroke (plus hideable navbar or something) allows you to switch
between servers, cycle through them, or show the above mentioned server
selection screen. 

Additionally there could be a screen with smaller versions of all
running displays (scaled server side if the server supports it, client
side otherwise) side by side. I imagine you could click those to blow
them up to fullsize.

Of course it will also take several servers, displays as command line
arguments.

Sounds good? 

Once I have all features of the tight server implemented, I plan on
starting on this. Client side cursor handling is done in cvs, I'd like
to add proper tunneling support and few other things, then this can be
taken on.

I'd really appreciate help with the gui design, as that is not what I am
good at at all, so if you have talent for this kind of thing, or maybe
your significant other does ;), please send in design drafts. I dont
want to use gtk, as that would make the whole thing quite a bit larger,
so only rects, lines, and possibly images are available as building
blocks.

> Actually I was surprised that you allow a cleartext password
> on the commandline.  The other vncviewers expect a one-way
> encrypted file reference only.  For security, I think (the
> details are beyond me).

Yeah, I'm a lazy bum. I'll fix that, its not good. VNC security is
hideous (sp?) anyhow, so I didnt bother much. I tunnel all my vnc
traffic through blowfish encrypted ssh connections anyway, so the 8
char cleartext password is little more than a nuisance. ;)

Cheers, 

Till