Can I access my desktop over VNC at a different screen size?

Question

I've already installed x11vnc and have it running well on my laptop upstairs. I can access my existing desktop session with no real problems, it works great. The problem I'm running into is the fact that I'm accessing my computer upstairs which is driving two 1920x1080 monitors, accessing it by VNC on my 1280x800 laptop (meaning I have to scroll a 3840x1080 desktop on my 1280x800 screen.

I've looked into running multiple VNC screens, but this doesn't seem to be the best solution, and I don't know if I can do this with x11vnc. I know that I can run native VNC screens at different geometries, but I don't think that this helps much, as each VNC screen is essentially a new session running basically nothing.

A while back in my sys-admin days, I remember having to set up a desktop environment on a Fedora machine. What was cool was that each VNC screen I created launched the default desktop environment. It "just worked," no fuss. Mind you, it wasn't the same desktop on each screen, but it worked. Any ideas?

Answer 1

As noted here on x11vnc's home page, you can scale and crop x11vnc's output to be whatever you'd like. In my case, I'd do something like this:

xllvnc -clip 1920x1080+0+0 -scale 1280x720 ...

This would crop my output to only contain the first monitor, then scale down the whole image to be 1280x720. Scaling can take place on the client as well, but this is given here as an option.

Answer 2

I had the same issue, as my desktop runs on a hdtv (1920X1080) and I wanted to view it on my laptop. Although I wasn't able to get vnc to scale, there is a program called FreeNX that does scale, it also has several other advantages over vnc, compression was another big one for me.