[H-GEN] VNC for console apps??

[Paul Gearon]

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On 16 May 2003, Russell Stuart wrote:

> Perhaps you are thinking these machines are servers.  They are not.  I
> obviously did not state my original question very well, as I think I
> have managed to confuse most people who responded.  Let me try again.

I didn't make an assumption about the machines being servers, but I was
thinking you meant system errors rather than application errors.  That's
because I was thinking of the system console, rather than virtual
consoles.

<snip/>
>
> I hope is obvious now that I don't what to see just what appears in the
> system logs.  Xconsole won't work, as it only displays what is written
> to /dev/console, not the currently selected virtual console.  I hope
> this also answers Trent's question about wanting to see urgent system
> messages.  Yes, I do.  But it is only a one part of the picture.

As others have stated, screen would be good for this.  Unfortunately the
user needs to start everything inside of screen for it to be of use to
you.

If you really need to see what's on their screen then you can cat
/dev/vcs? where the ? is the console number.  Unfortunately, this doesn't
let you interact with the program talking to the console, only view the
console or change the text that's being displayed on it.  There's also the
/dev/vcsa? nodes which do pretty much the same thing, only they also show
control characters (using some obscure translation which I don't really
get).  For more on this see "man vcsa"

Not quite what you need, but I hope it helps.

Regards,
Paul Gearon

Software Engineer                Telephone:   +61 7 3876 2188
Plugged In Software              Fax:         +61 7 3876 4899
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