Rui CarmoProbably the most useful Open Source tool of all (ok, maybe SSH is more useful), VNC was originally created by the AT&T Research facility in Cambridge and is a remote display protocol that, despite being rather inefficient (something modern forks try to improve upon, but certainly still less than RDP, has the advantage of being very simple and require only very light clients (the Windows binary is contained within just 230KB, and Java implementations can be downloaded on-the-fly from any browser).
Mac OS X includes a VNC server (check the Sharing preference pane, it’s part of Apple Remote Desktop).
Mac Screen Sharing
Apple uses a variant of the VNC protocol for its own screen sharing solution, and this article has some useful tweaks to the Leopard built-in client that I’m reproducing here for safekeeping:
Displaying a Bonjour browser
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1
Displaying additional controls (pre-10.5.5)
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing \
'NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar' -dict-add 'TB Item Identifiers' \
'(Scale,Control,Share,Curtain,Capture,FullScreen,GetClipboard,SendClipboard,Quality)'
In 10.5.5, Apple decided to get stingy again, so this workaround became necessary–which is kind of ridiculous.
When Snow Leopard rolled around, they broke even more of the UI, but it’s still possible to set display quality via a preference (via):
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing controlObserveQuality n
…gives you:
- black and white
- grayscale
- 8-bit color
- 16-bit color
- full color
Resources
Tricks
My current (minimalist) Xvnc startup file for Linux, so that I remember
that unsetting SESSION_MANAGER is the right way to avoid complaints
from gnome-session:
$ cat .vnc/xstartup
#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
gnome-session &