Guest damianlewis Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Hi, I am pleased to announce that I have successfully compiled and run VNC on the SPV. It is very early days and there are many features missing. Speed is an issue, as well as no mouse control, decent key handling, etc. It does connect to a host and display the remote screen. The executable and source code are attached. WARNING: THIS IS PRE-ALPHA AND SHOULD ONLY BE USED BY EXPERIENCED SPV USERS AND DEVELOPERS - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! This is a port from the Windows CE version, ported to support the SPV's ARM processor. I have set the screen size and dialogs to fit the SPV. INSTRUCTIONS 1. Unzip and copy vncview.exe to SD card or phone and run 2. Enter your remote machine address and display number, e.g. 192.168.0.55:0 - type in the : first (hold # down and select), then type the rest of the address, otherwise it is almost impossible to get the : in the connect string. Click OK 3. The password dialog appears - enter your remote host's VNC password and click OK. 4. After a while (20 secs - 1 min) the host screen appears. 5. Home key takes you out of the app, use joypad to navigate dialogs. LIMITATIONS 1. You can only currently send numbers and Up, Down, Left, Right, Enter to the host. 2. Occasionally the VNC window disappears behind other apps on the SPV - use SPTaskmgr to bring it to the front again. 3. The host connect string is stored in the registry under Current User->Software->ORL. You must use RegEdit to delete the entire key each time you wish to change the host connect string after the first time. 4. Slow due to storing and refreshing entire remote screen instead of just the portion viewable on the SPV. DEVELOPER INFO 1. Download and unzip source to your machine (originally in c:downloadsspv...") 2. Open the workspace vncviewer.vcw in EVC 3. Ensure that winsock.lib is on the Link line of the project settings for vncview 4. Set EVC to Pocket PC/WCE ARM/Pocket PC. 5. Rebuild All I have no more time to put into the code and I do not have much experience with SPV key handling, etc. I hope someone takes this further, as this could be a really useful app. spacemonkey, mboden, etc. - you could really sort this one! Cheers, Damian "Hack" Lewisvncview_spv_prealpha_exe.zipvnc_spv_prealpha.zip
Guest damianlewis Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 VNC is a platform-independent remote control application - e.g. operate your PC from your SPV. More info at http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/ DO NOT INSTALL THE PRE-ALPHA UNLESS YOU ARE CONFIDENT THAT YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!! Cheers, Damian
Guest spacemonkey Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Nice... probably more of a techy showoff toy than anything practical, but still... nice...
Guest Cent Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Good work Damian ... I will have a look at the key navigation. Would love for this to be Remote Desktop since its a lot faster .. but hey its a start ....:)
Guest damianlewis Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Hi, Just some quick thoughts on improving the code: 1. Use Left softkey to toggle between Menu, Display Scrolling and Mouse Movement 2. Only refresh SPV viewable area (the code is in the source but not implemented) - the speedup effect will be considerable. 3. Red back key to exit Considering how much data this is shifting, at the moment you still get an almost usable amount of update on the display. A speedup would make this practical for those emergency situations where you are away from base. To test, open a shared session from another PC at the same time and use it to control the remote host. You will see what I mean then. Cheers, Damian
Guest zizione Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Oops... I can't get it to work. I start VNC Server on my PC where ActiveSync is installed. I starts the main interface, enter the IP adress of the PC and when I press OK, I just kills itself ! Am i doing things wrong ?
Guest damianlewis Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 zizione, Does your SPV connect through the cradle to the Internet properly - i.e. you can browse the Web using your PC connection and SPV on the cradle? The host address is of the form X.X.X.X:d where d is the display number (usually 0). So for my machine on my network, I use 192.168.0.5:0 You must use your PC's real IP address and not localhost or 127.0.0.1 as the SPV will try to connect to itself! If you are using DHCP on your PC, try adding an extra address in your network settings, then use that address. Of course, a real remote machine accessed over the Internet is best. Once it connects, you should get a password dialog almost immediately. Hope this helps. Damian P.S. use sptaskmgr to see if the viewer has just disappeared into the background.
Guest fraser Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 For those thinking that VNC is only a show-off tool, think again. I use it most of the time that I'm sitting a PC. I can remote control any of my home PCs from my wi-fi laptop (especially the one that runs Winamp to my hi-fi) and now my SPV (thanks Damian, looking forward to see how this develops). I can control these PCs literally from anywhere in the world, and I use it to manage my WinMX downloads. IMHO, it's one of the most useful applications I've ever come across. Completely cross-platform (ports available for just about everything) and open-source. Kicks expensive tools like PC Anywhere into the ground. Only downside is that the only encryption is during the password phase. Everything after that is in the clear and can be sniffed, so be wary of entering passwords via an untrusted network, like the internet. You can use SSH tunneling or STunnel (already available on the SPV) to get great encryption. Mind you, the SPV already uses clear-text passwords on your e-mail, so it's not a unique issue to VNC.
Guest Gorskar Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Hm, very interesting. So using this I could (for example) use my spv as a remote control for my dvd software via connecting over the internet to it? Now that is a fancy use of technology!!!
Guest fraser Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 You got it Gorskar. You could do anything, it almost turns the SPV into a full PC. Want to use MS Word on a machine, but don't have it installed? VNC. I could't get it to work at first. I would get the password prompt from the host, then the main window appears for a moment and disappears. The PC was running at 1024x768x32, which I'm thinking may actually require more physical memory than the phone has. Dropping the resolution to 1024x768x8 seemed to improve things, the main screen appeared and stayed around. However, after 30 seconds of nothing happening, the phone rebooted!! Any thoughts?
Guest Monolithix [MVP] Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 I'll have to try this once i'm at home. Another cool app you can get is win2vnc, which allows you to control 2 computers both with monitors from a kb and mouse connected to only one, without the need for a kvm. I can now control my laptop from my PC without having to twist round :)
Guest fraser Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Monolithix, I'm doing the exact same thing with the *nix version, X2VNC. Got two windows PCs, each on either side of a Unix box. The same keyboard/mouse controls all of them, with a common shared clipboard! It's great being able to cut and paste code between them. All I need now is another two displays, top and bottom, and I'll be taking it a little to far! As I said, VNC is very cool. The original folk behind it had an amazing system set up. Each employee had a badge that could detect who is sitting at each system. As you went up to any computer in the building, you got your own personal display. The same system worked the phone extensions. Very innovative.
Guest Monolithix [MVP] Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Heh nice. Btw i thought the clipboard was only one way in VNC, client to server, but not the other way...?
Guest Monolithix [MVP] Posted February 21, 2003 Report Posted February 21, 2003 Just a though: i assume this is accessing the privilidged area of the phone?
Guest fraser Posted February 22, 2003 Report Posted February 22, 2003 Btw i thought the clipboard was only one way in VNC, client to server, but not the other way...? Don't think so, I've never had a problem either way. Granted in my setup, the Unix one is a bit funny about the clipboard, but that's just Unix. :) On Unix there are several clipboards and applications are a bit hit and miss on whether they work with each other, let alone a windows box! Between the two Windows boxes (which aren't even connected) it's pretty reliable. Not sure if you can copy objects across, like image scrap files, I only use it for code and URLs etc.
Guest Monolithix [MVP] Posted February 22, 2003 Report Posted February 22, 2003 hmm just tried it on win2vnc and i can only copy (plain text) from client > server and not vice versa. Not that it really matters, if its that important i can always stick the text in a text file and access it over the lan :)
Guest cyrilthefish Posted February 23, 2003 Report Posted February 23, 2003 where is the EXE? has it been removed or have i just missed the link? VNC would be very handy for me, as work block all internet traffic except port 80... this would finally enable me to controll my internet server pc from work! :)
Guest fraser Posted February 23, 2003 Report Posted February 23, 2003 cyrilthefish, look at the first post in this thread...
Guest Cent Posted February 23, 2003 Report Posted February 23, 2003 Please follow new developments here : http://www.modaco.com/viewtopic.php?t=3831 Thanks ...
Guest kingdom master Posted February 23, 2003 Report Posted February 23, 2003 so can this only be used when connected to active sync, or can u use it to retrieve files while out and about?
Guest Cent Posted February 23, 2003 Report Posted February 23, 2003 so can this only be used when connected to active sync, or can u use it to retrieve files while out and about? You will find your answer here : http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/ :wink: Hope this helps ....
Guest Ryud0 Posted February 23, 2003 Report Posted February 23, 2003 sorry but it doesnt work on my spv and i applied the instructions the vnc viewer kill itself when i press connect ????????????
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