In the case of VNC, trust me. You've got to see this . Before I get into how to setup this product, I'll let you in on its hiding place. From the download page, select the version that works for your system. I picked up both the Linux and the Windows versions.
Installation is a breeze.
For the impatient, here it is in a nutshell. The last two lines copy the Java classes to use with the Java VNC viewer. You do not have to do this, but considering what I tell you later on about the browser side of VNC, you'll be glad you did. For the installation part, there's not much else to do. This is actually a Perl script that runs the Xvnc server.