Vnc on Mac

[Arnt Witteveen]

> In answer to this question, I thought it was worth giving 
> comments on my 
> own experiences of VNCing on the Mac, so this is quite long...

Thanks for typing all this out for me...

> > Hi all, I'm trying to set up some things using vnc in a 
> mixed win/mac 
> > environment. Win is not a problem for me, but I know little 
> about the 
> > Mac side of vnc. Can anyone tell me what to use/do there?
> 
> I assume you want to control the Mac remotely, so you need a Mac VNC 
> server...?

Indeed, and a viewer as well.

> The first question to ask is which OS version you are using: 
> Classic or OS X?

Like the joke goes: Yes. (meaning both ;-)

> If you are using OSX then you need OSXVnc:
> http://stevek.com/VNC/OSXVnc2.html

thanks for the link, the osxvnc domain led me nowhere...

> sharing of the main screen. -Pity. Also, the cursor is not 
> sent from the 
> server (not a problem with a decent connection, but seeing the remote 
> cursor can be a useful indicator of what's happening under a slower 
> connection).

That does suck. But I'll live ;-)


> If you are using Classic Mac OS then the best server is ChromiVNC:
> http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/vnc/

> It does suffer a couple of known problems (such as dragging a Finder 
> icon, or some other draggable item, can cause a lock-up which 
> has to be 
> freed at the Mac end by jogging the physical mouse - my own 
> vncPatches68k gets around that though -but I 'lost' my website, so I 
> need to get that sorted out before it's available again), and 
> it has the 
> occasional incompatibility with certain software (I found working 
> remotely in Think Pascal would eventually crash it, and using Eudora 
> remotely for a period of time, half an hour, say, also occasionally 
> causes a freeze).

That is not good news... Anythign is better than nothing, but freezing the mac is not a good thing. Is this still developed by someone or is this going to stay as it is now, for the bugs etc?

> The old 'official' AT&T VNC server for Mac (Classic) is very buggy, 
> often causing complete system-freeze/crash -it does some rather 
> 'naughty' things at interrupt time, so it's not very surprising... 
> However, some have found it just about works, as long as they 
> don't do 
> too much serious work remotely through to the Mac.

Not for me then...


> The main thing to watch out for in VNCThing is a bug in one of the 
> encodings (RRE) -make sure you always deselect this in the encoding 
> options. This bug causes it to lose connection regularly with 
> ChromiVNC 

Hmm, that's not too good then, since you say that is the best server. then again, a dropped connection, oh well...


> For OSX, another viewer is VNCDimension (www.mdimension.com). I find 
[..]
> latest version (0.7) -it seems to not keep up too well with mouse 
> tracking, etc. I'm not sure if the problem is to do with the 

Hmm, this might make it a little frustrating to work with perhaps...


> Finally, OSX is basically a FreeBSD-based OS (i.e. unix, 
> effectively), 
> so the unix VNC viewer will compile and work fine under X11 
> on Mac OSX. 

Hmm, I'll see if the mac's that need it are set up that way, but I doubt it.


> Anyway, I hope that proves to be a useful overview!

It certainly did, many thanks!
Arnt