The VNC bridges gap between Windows and Linux systems for desktop sharing. However there are few other alternatives to this. The “vnc” package provides a VNC client (vncviewer) in Linux. You can check if your system has vnc package installed as follows:

[mark@techpulp ~]$ which vncviewer
/usr/bin/vncviewer
[mark@techpulp ~]$ rpm -q -f /usr/bin/vncviewer
vnc-4.1.3-1.fc10.i386
[mark@techpulp ~]$

If you don’t have the package installed, you can use “yum” in Fedora and “apt-get” in Debian/Ubuntu Linux distributions to install it.

To use the VNC client, you can run the command “vncviewer”. This opens up a prompt as shown in the image below.
vncviewer

You can set the connection preferences by pressing “Options…” button. It opens up a window as shown in the picture below. You can select preferences like colour resolution, full screen mode etc.

vncviewer-connection-options

To open the VNC session, type the VNC server connection information in the text field as shown in the first picture. In this example the server information is “192.168.20.81:0″  which means you are intended to connect to a VNC server running on a host with IP address 192.168.20.81 and the display number is zero. If the server requires authentication, you will be asked for password. Otherwise you will be directly taken to the VNC session.

Once the VNC session is opened, you can type “F8″ button to open options menu as shown below. Using this menu you can do operation like toggling full screen mode, sending “Ctrl+Alt+Delete” key combination etc.

vncviewer-menu

Unlike in Windows system, it is possible to run multiple VNC servers with unique display numbers under Linux. For example, user “neo” can start his own VNC server and another user “liz” can open her own VNC server in the same Linux system. However their display numbers vary and have to be unique with in the system. If the VNC server started by user neo uses a display number 1, then neo uses 192.168.20.81:1 to connect to his VNC session.