Tao of Mac

Sep 11th 2007 · 2 min read

VNC and Monitor Antics

The thing about real life is that, well, it happens. So I’ve been back from the beach (much) earlier than expected and spent some time running various errands of a personal nature, of which I can mention replacing the (freshly deceased) monitor that was hooked up to the with an HP w17e.

The monitor was moderately cheap (Eur.179 at the local supermarket), and I picked it because:

  • All of a sudden, monitors below 17” vanished from retail outlets (otherwise I’d have gotten a much smaller one).
  • It has a very low pedestal that lets it fit inside the server closet without major rearrangement of shelves.
  • It is mercifully devoid of any stupid design frills (it is a typically boring, reliable, unobtrusive, HP design).
  • It has stereo speakers (not by any means stellar, but which may come in handy if I ever need to use it on another machine).
  • It is not glossy. At all.

Thing is, it has a 1440×900 native resolution which the won’t (by default) allow you to select, so I’ll be playing around with /System/Library/Displays/Overrides soon. There’s no real hurry, since the monitor is going to be off 99.9% of the time (it being used only when I really need to be at the console or when I need to hook up an external monitor to one of the laptops).

And yes, I know all about (which I know at least one of my buddies uses) and . I’d rather learn how to do it myself, or pester someone at to improve their support for this kind of configuration and at HP for them to start acknowledging that the exists.

Anyway, a word about how I access the machine remotely: I am now using , which I mentioned the other day. In fact, I’ve just downloaded the latest alpha, and not only does it smoke in terms of speed, it now works properly with the Portuguese keyboard layout when connecting to the (much vilified, and rightly so) server.

For some reason the previous alpha didn’t do it for me when connecting to a , but this one does.

It isn’t working out with vino, though (regardless of what I set the options to), but I think this may have more to do with keycode translations on the side, since vino has been known to be somewhat temperamental on occasion – although I have usually been able to use RealVNC on to connect to boxes and gotten correct keyboard behavior. But alas, I have no box while on vacation, so I can’t figure it out just yet.

Regardless, I hereby pronounce to be the best client available on the , period. Go out and grab it now.

Minor note regarding US developers’ laziness and navel-gazing – of course it had to be an “European“European developer to finally fix international keyboards in , after years and years. And people wonder why some US software doesn’t sell in “Europe“European…