The Tao of Mac
Probably 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:
Not all of these are related to VNC, but VNC has been used for things like multi-machine (i.e., having two different machines side by side and move the mouse/keyboard across machines) for a long time now and is better understood by most people, so I’ve lumped everything here:
| Category | Date | Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Servers | May’12 | VirtualGL | Finely tuned OpenGL encapsulation (with server-side hardware acceleration). |
| Older | Schnitz Remote Remote | for reverse connections. | |
| Alkit VNC | allows single-window sharing. | ||
| RealVNC | the original (and still the reference) implementation. Also has the most efficient client (old homepage) | ||
| Vine Server | native Mac OS X server, supporting multiple simultaneous remote sessions | ||
| Ultra VNC Single-Click Server | a nice, customizable Windows server that helpdesk staff can e-mail to someone in need of help. | ||
| J2ME VNC | for MIDP / J2ME | ||
| MetaVNC | an intriguing way to share single windows | ||
| Reinventing the wheel | Apr’11 | noVNC | A decent, secure websockets/@[email protected] client. |
| Apr’10 | Ajax VNC | A “Clientless” VNC solution implemented with canvas and, regrettably, a Java server. |
|
| Clients (Mac) | Dec’08 | JollysFastVNC | The best client out there in terms of speed and international keyboard support. |
| VNCDimension | partial support for non-US keyboards (but no dead keys) and very fast graphical updates. | ||
| “Chicken of the VNC”:SourceForge:projects/cotvnc/ | No international key support, works OK with the built-in Mac OS X server. | ||
| VNCThing | read my blog entry for more (and a link to the source code). | ||
| Workspot modified VNC | Tried it once. | ||
| Clients (Other) | Jun’12 | pyvnc | A ctypes client that uses libvnc directly. |
| May’09 | vnc2dl | a client that renders on a DisplayLink device. | |
| Older | FlashVNC | a Flash viewer | |
| MochaVNC | for Palm and Pocket PC, supports post-3.3 procotol versions and has a built-in SSH tunneler. | ||
| PVNC | for the PlayStation Portable (has some ARM code, if I remember correctly) | ||
| DirectVNC | framebuffer-based clients. | ||
| fbvnc | |||
| Palm VNC | with server-side scaling extensions | ||
| Enhanced Full-Screen Clients | |||
| SSHVNC | a combined client | ||
| Tools | Aug’11 | Gitso | A reverse VNC connection tool for support purposes. |
| Older | VNC Snapshot | can take screenshots of a section of the display and save them in JPEG format | |
| VNCj | a nice way to serve Java AWT applications | ||
| Vnc2swf | a Flash recording tool, which now has an editing tool available. | ||
| LibVNCServer | also has a client library | ||
| perlVNC | fear. | ||
| PyVNC – a Python VNC client | |||
| “VNC Reflector”:SourceForge:projects/vnc-reflector/ | |||
| Multi-Machine (a2b) | Older | SynergyKM | Synergy packaged as a preference pane, as it should. Verified working in 2008 under Leopard. |
| Synergy | a platform-agnostic package focused on precisely this application – QuickSynergy is a very nice repackaging. | ||
| osx2x | does it all, Mac to X or VNC | ||
| osx2vnc | |||
| x2vnc | X to VNC | ||
| win2vnc | Windows to VNC, not multi-monitor friendly, (another version which is multi-monitor friendly) | ||
| “x2x”:FreshMeat:projects/x2x/ | the original concept, for completeness |
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 &