Remote User Interaction

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# 4. Remote User Interaction

It is often desirable to be able to interact with a remote computer through a live connection, where commands can be issued and programs run exactly as if they were executing on the local machine. MS-Windows applications such as PC-Anywhere can be used to interact with other MS-Windows computers, but they don't supply connectivity to QNX. For the QNX environment, there are essentially two choices to perform remote interaction:

1. Character-based terminal session. This typically means a terminal session using telnet. A telnet session will provide a login prompt on the MS-Windows computer, which allows the user to log in and interact with the QNX machine exactly as if he were logged in locally. This requires that both the MS-Windows and QNX computers have TCP/IP installed. Telnet is included with the TCP/IP facilities from both QNX and Microsoft. Terminal sessions using alternate protocols are available from third parties under QNX.

2. Remote window session. QNX's Photon microGUI provides a very rich graphical user interface (GUI) environment. One of the features of Photon is that it can, in essence, project a view of its user interface to another computer, allowing more than one user to interact with the interface at the same time. In addition, Photon can project an entirely independent interface to another computer so that more than one user can have independent GUI sessions on a single QNX machine. The Phindows (Photon in Windows) product from QNX allows Photon to project its user interface into a window within MS-Windows. This provides an MS-Window user with a mechanism for dealing with QNX in a graphical environment over a LAN or WAN, even to the point of taking over control of a QNX machine at a remote site.

Both of these mechanisms are interactive in nature. The user is able to interact with a remote machine, but there is no data transfer, file transfer or peripheral-sharing facility between QNX and Windows provided by these mechanisms.

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