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...
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...?
The first question to ask is which OS version you are using: Classic or OS X?
If you are using OSX then you need OSXVnc: http://stevek.com/VNC/OSXVnc2.html
I've not used this seriously, so there could be several bugs I don't know about. However, my basic testing seemed to show it works quite well. It supports many encodings, including newer bandwidth-efficient ones like 'zlib', 'z-hextile' and 'tight'. One nice feature is the ability to choose a particular area of the screen, or a particular window (OSX10.2 only), to share.
The main drawback at the moment is lack of sensible interface for the preferences (you actually have to manually set up the password file! - and how do you limit the choice of encodings at the server end? [but that's rarely needed since many/all? viewers allow that] -the GUI for setting prefs does not really exist at all!) But once configured, it does appear to do the job. Another downside is that it only allows 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).
If you are using Classic Mac OS then the best server is ChromiVNC: http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/vnc/
ChromiVNC has the ability to share all screens connected to your Mac -they are dealt with as spearate display numbers (:0, :1, :2, etc...) It also deals with the command-key at the server end by mapping control+option to the command key (i.e. it is not necessary for the viewer to have some special emulation). So command-key shortcuts can be sent through quite easily (as long as they do not also require either control or option as modifiers) - cmd-Q is emulated by pressing ctrl-opt-Q at the viewer end, for example.
It has one notable (and unique?) feature, which is its on-the-fly encoding decision. -For each screen update, it checks to see which available encoding is the most bandwidth-efficient. [Note to developers: would be nice to see this feature in other servers!]
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).
Another thing to note about ChromiVNC is that it does not support the more bandwidth-efficient encodings (zlib, z-hextile, tight, etc.) -but neither does the Mac AT&T server, so there's no choice here under Classic Mac OS.
I see it's not officially available from realvnc and the ones at the old at&t vnc page says 'beta', which is fine with me as long as it crashes only itself, not the whole computer...
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.
If you find there's a specific incompatibility problem that you cannot work around when using some software remotely with ChromiVNC, then it may well be worth trying out the AT&T server.
Or do any of the other distros/mods (tight, tridia, ...) have a Mac server + client? I've checked the ones I know and looked around on google, so far I've only turned up a mac viewer (vnc thing, any good?). Any mods with good features I might consider (seemless window scaling anywhere?)
There are viewers available for both Classic and OSX.
The official AT&T viewer (for Classic Mac OS) probably gives the best performance on older, slower Macs, but tends to have fairly frequent problems losing connection (just requiring a reconnection). I've not seen it crash (i.e. unexpectedly quit) that I can remember, and not known it ever bring down the whole system (unlike the server!)
One strength (under certain circumstances) of this viewer is that you can alter the keymapping to do almost anything you want - eg, setting almost any key combination to send middle/right-click. (Though this also makes it seem very complicated, if you need to get into it...) Another point is that you can scale the view to certain set scales (100%,66%,50%,33% and maybe 25%?), which is sometimes quite useful.
VNCThing is quite a solid performer, and works natively on both OSX and Classic (it's a Carbon app). It has very nice window scaling (using "Shrink to fit" -you can make the window any size), and supports 'zlib' and 'z-hextile' encodings, but not 'tight', I think.
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 because of the on-the-fly encoding decision built in to that server (mentioned above) - all other servers just use a single 'preferred' encoding all the time (so they would also make VNCThing immediately disconnect if they used RRE as their preferred encoding). There's also an occasional dragging issue with viewing unix-based Xvnc servers. Another slight negative point is that it does not allow direct use of middle-click, requiring instead some emulation such as cmd-click (though it does right-click directly!)
For OSX, another viewer is VNCDimension (www.mdimension.com). I find this works well apart from a problem with rate of event updates in the 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 way it asks the server for events, or perhaps it only causes trouble over a faster connection (fast LAN, etc. -I'm just thinking that a slower connection may possibly cause it to send fewer events, leading to less updates, hence less of a tracking problem...?) Version 0.6 was better, but had disconnect problems when the window became invisible or was docked - v0.6 also had an issue with viewing multiple servers of different sizes -I think v0.7 fixed this? Finally, there's an issue using it with OSX10.2 since it cannot look up machine names correctly -you have to use the IP address. Their website says version 0.8 (in development) will fix this.
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. In fact, I personally find this the best overall solution since I have to use X11 all the time anyway. -No drag problem (of VNCThing when viewing Xvnc servers), better performance of events/tracking (compared to VNCDimension in particular, but also somewhat better than VNCThing), and direct support for middle-click (compared to VNCThing -though I'm not sure if there is any emulation available if you do not have a three-button mouse on your Mac).
Apart from requiring X11 (which is not a problem for those who already need X11), the only drawback I can think of (which does not affect my own use since I mainly work over fast LAN) is that it might not support some of the more bandwidth-efficient encodings (eg, zlib, tight, etc.) - I've not checked that recently, so I could be wrong about the latest unix version...
Anyway, I hope that proves to be a useful overview!
Adrian _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
