I found one advantage of using ssh (e.g. putty) over vnc: no error bells. I was using a terminal under vnc and the bells were driving me mad. I disabled them in vim with:
:set visualbell t_vb=
but still got them on the bash command line. Tried various things from google to disable them at the linux end but nothing worked. Tried disabling the sounds in vnc (Control Panel/Sounds, VNC = None) but not joy.
Don't especially want to unplug the speaker so I went with the flow and used ssh.
Sudden thought: maybe I WAS going mad?


There is a way to do this in Gnome Termianl and maybe KDE's Terminal. I don't remeber but I will get back to you.