[plug] Modems & X

[Peter Wright]

On Tue, Mar 20, 2001 at 03:44:20PM +0800, Andrew Francis wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Campbell, David (Ex AS17) wrote:
> > What applications that spring to mind that could compress the X
> > bandwith across the modem 
[ ... ]
> There are a number of solutions you could give a go, ranging in
> complexity. Someone's already mentioned SSH; this will do deflate (a la
> gzip & pkzip) compression on the X stream,
[ ... ]
> And there's DXPC, which basically 'filters' the X connection and
> compresses it (in an X-savvy way, rather than simple zip compression, so
> the gains are apparantly pretty good).

I've used dxpc two or three years ago, when I was on a 28.8ish modem link.
Running X stuff remotely through dxpc (as compared to not) was a very very
stark comparison... non-dxpc felt very very slow - you could use it if you
really needed to, but it hurt :). Dxpc by comparison was quite zippy and
perfectly usable. It felt just slightly slower than doing stuff on the
desktop (admittedly most of the stuff I was using wasn't heavily
graphical).

The article that I originally read (I think LinuxJournal, but can't be
sure) in which I found out about dxpc talked a lot about the clever
X-specific compression tricks it used - like, for example, just removing
significant chunks from the data stream that simply weren't needed. At any
rate, it should give much better results than just ssh-based compression.

[ the rest aimed at David ]

However, dxpc takes a bit of effort to set up, whereas if you've already
got a ssh client/daemon running at each end you don't need to set up
anything. Try out ssh first and see if the results from that are sufficient
to your needs - if not, try dxpc.

And if you're feeling enthusiastic, try all the others that Andrew, etc.
mentioned and I know nothing about so can't comment on. :)

I think the form for ssh is just 

$ ssh -X -C username at remotehost

and then run an X app from the remote host and it should appear on the
local display.

> Cheers
> -- 
> Andrew Francis (locust at fastlane.net.au)

Pete.
-- 
http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~pete/

--
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