I won't be updating this gist any more, but will leave it up as a reference for others. X11, unfortunately, is not compressed.NOTE: Given its current state, I've given up on tigervnc and now rely on 'ssh -X' to execute remote gui apps. which would come close, or use the native X11 forwarding which basically just creates a window on a remote linux machine. On Linux, you can either try creating a VNC display of arbitrary size (since it's not limited by any physical hardware, try -geometry option), and running your application inside, full-screen. It is thus sometimes desirable to be able to limit which chunk of a physical display to mirror - hence, the feature. Which means windows VNC servers essentially mirror the contents of the primary monitor in their own memory, and send that virtual copy over VNC. On windows, there was no concept of separate GUI sessions for a long time, until recently via Remote Desktop, which is a hybrid solution. Specifically, tightvnc does not share the contents of the local physical screen over VNC protocol - it instead creates a separate X11 (gui) session, with a virtual display, and shares the contents of such virtual display over VNC.

Linux VNC servers work differently from Windows VNC servers. My question is, is it possible to share a single window or application from linux? If so, how do I go about it? If not, is there a different open source tool that I can use to do so? I installed ubuntu-desktop on the server and am able to view the entire desktop successfully.

I have installed TightVNC server on an Ubuntu server. This question doesn't say that is is windows-only but doesn't describe how to set it up. I don't know if this means that it is only available for the windows version or not. The user interface to choose shared screen area is very intuitive and easy to use. The position and dimensions of the shared screen area can be changed dynamically, and client windows will adjust their dimensions on the fly.

Any single window or any rectangular screen area can be shared instead of the whole screen. From the TightVNC what's new page under TightVNC 1.3dev1, Win32 development (unstable) version, it says I am looking for a tool that allows single window sharing using VNC.

Tightvnc linux