running an application versus a display

I would like to be able to display remote applications on tiger and am planning to accomplishs this via X11. However, X11 is a pain on the Mac as it is NOT transparent to the user… Is there a way to use VNC to do this instead of X11?

Yes, you can remotely access your Mac using VNC. You are going to need to install and run a VNC server on the machine that you plan on remotely accessing. In your case, since you want to connect to a machine running Tiger you will need to install and configure OSXvnc:

http://www.redstonesoftware.com/vnc.html

Once the server is installed on your Mac, you are going to need to configure OSXvnc as a startup item. You can do this by launching OSXvnc and clicking on the Startup tab. From there, click on ‘Configure Startup Item’. The rest should be self explanatory.

Configuring OSX as a startup item will create a script in /Library that launches OSXvnc in the background when the machine boots up. It’s completely invisible unless you go into the Activity monitor or run a top or grep command from the terminal. Users won’t know you’re connected unless you start trying to control the mouse or type things, in which case you’re in for a battle if they’re trying to do something at the same time. If you keep the default settings, the OSXvnc servers will advertise their availability on the network via Rendezvous, so if you get the Chicken of the VNC viewer (the only one that currently implements the Rendezvous protocol), you’ll be able to connect to the servers without needing to know their host names or IP addresses.

If you want to view/control your Mac from something other than a Mac than you are going to need a suitable VNC viewer for that system. Otherwise Chicken of the VNC, as I had mentioned above, will be the viewer that you will need to install and run on the other Mac that you want to remotely access from.

thanks for the info, but I want to run an app remotely, not a full session

To launch an application remotely, login to the computer from a second Mac OS X machine, open its Applications folder, and double-click on an application. You can also execute this through the Terminal, etc.

In addition, Mac OS X 10.4 supports simultaneous user accounts. So, if a person is using account #1, you can log in to account #2 and both people can use the computer at the same time.

This will allow you to use X11, VNC, etc., while not disturbing account #1.