Does anyone know of such a beast? Last night I had to drive to my mother’s place as she insisted there was a problem with her email and needed me to come check it out. Sadly, it was due to the Buzz stuff and if she actually read the page, she’d have seen the “skip the Buzz, take me to my inbox” link. Instead, I arrived to a half-dozen firefox windows open to the same Buzz introduction page.
In light of that, I know I can setup VNC or NX or whatever to get onto her computer. That’s fine, but I’d like something like iChat that does screen *sharing* so I can see what silly thing she’s doing and prevent me from getting in the car in the first place (not that I dislike visiting my mother, understand, but this is a fairly routine occurrence that would best be done by remote since I’m not so good at hiding the irritation in my face).
I’m not aware of anything that can do this… is there something out there that will do the trick? Right now she’s running Mandriva 2009.0, but I plan to upgrade that to Fedora 12 one of these days.
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I think that the best solution would be to make a script which runs x11vnc and sends you an email with the IP address/port, and place it on her desktop. I tried several solutions but this one was the only which I kinda managed to get working with my parents who are not computer-friendly at all.
It was easier to setup this script and explain it like “Just click this icon on your desktop to call me for help” than to go for any other solution I am aware of
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Have you checked out recent Empathy? It has a right-click share desktop built right in.
Oh slick. I just stuck empathy on my F12 machine but it tells me I need to install a backend and doesn’t give me the option of setting up an account. Will have to explore further when I have more available time. Thanks for the tip!
Eugeni: does that actually let you see their screen that they’re logged into? I thought it would open up a second desktop, not what they are currently looking at.
vino provides desktop sharing for the currently running Gnome desktop. Once installed, you can enbale it by going to System->Preferences->Remote Desktop.
x11vnc shares current X11 display.
Another option is the latest beta of skype, which offers desktop sharing.
ooo…. more options. Never heard of vino before. Will have to check that out.
Thanks for the tidbit on x11vnc… I wasn’t aware of that. Thanks! Skype isn’t something I’m overly interested in. I don’t trust skype.
Empathy’s remote function runs over vino afaik. So you have to install vino in order to use this.
Empathy actually uses vino under the hood, e.g. it spawns a copy over dbus. The nice part is having VNC tunneled through telepathy tubes though… so you don’t have to worry about NATs etc!
Btw what “backend” are you talking about? Just make sure you also have the “telepathy-gabble” package installed for XMPP support (iirc the Fedora rpm depends on this “backend”) and yes, all this is XMPP-only.
Skype for Linux has screen sharing too eh
There’s also KDE’s Krfb.
Michael: I can only assume it’s a bug in Fedora 12… it tells me I need a backend before I can setup an account, and I do have the telepathy-gabble package installed, but when I go to add an account, I get this backend notice (and there’s nothing to pick from). Very odd, but I haven’t looked at it very much yet. I’ll look a bit more today.
Krfb is new to me, but I don’t really use KDE. Thanks, I’m going to look into that as well.
Lots of options apparently. =) I had no idea there were so many. Thanks everyone!