Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Screen sharing software or similar

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

Renat Golubchyk writes:

> My relatives live 200 km away. They have a daughter, and I need to help
> her out with school homework etc. At the moment we cannot do it on a
> regular basis, because doing it over the phone is really difficult and
> time consuming. I thought some screen sharing software would solve
> this. A video conferencing or a VoIP feature would be a nice bonus,
> too. For easy writing I would probably buy graphics tablets since
> writing math formulas or drawing isn't particularly fast or easy with
> keyboard and mouse.
> 
> So, is there some easy-to-use Linux program? I have Linux desktops on
> both ends (Ubuntu and Gentoo), so portability or OS-independence is not
> a requirement.
> 
> Do you have any other ideas? For the record, we have a 2 Mbit DSL line
> on one end and a 6 Mbit on the other. Those are, of course, downstream
> bandwidth rates.

You could use Skype to replace your phone communication, if you don't mind 
its spookiness (I do). It also does video conferencing. If plain audio is 
enough, I'd use TeamSpeak.

Some jabber client for text conversations would be fine. Also works for 
formulas, if you know some LaTeX...

And then VNC (epecially TightVNC) to share your drawings on the tablet.

For ultimate performance, you could install NX, which makes X forwarding 
amazingly fast. One party connects to the remote NX server and opens a KDE 
3.5 session, which will work nearly as fast if it were opened locally. And 
the other connects via VNC to that KDE session, which is also very fast 
then because it runs locally, not over DSL. I do not know if other window 
managers than KDE 3.5 have the VNC sharing feature, I have not found it in 
KDE4.

You might need some port forwarding if you both are NATed behind a router.

	Wonko