Thursday, November 08, 2007

VNC client built right in to Leopard

After installing Leopard I've been gradually re-installing the apps I need only as required. Just now I wanted to connect to a server via VNC and was about to re-install ChickenVNC but instead thought I'd try something...

We know that Leopard supports screen sharing and that it's built on top of VNC. It turns out that you can do a Command-K in the finder, connect to server, and use a url like this: vnc://hostname to connect. If it's not running on the default VNC port of 5900 you can add the port in the usual way as shown in the picture.

As dreena is a a linux box, I get a warning dialog box as shown. The client seems very snappy and works nicely.

When I connect to an old Panther MacOS X Server it works just fine and obviously doesn't give the warning about keystroke encryption. Digg this.


Update
I've noticed that the built-in VNC doesn't interoperate too well with the RealVNC server for windows. In this case Chicken Of the VNC seems to start up the session much faster for some reason.

11 comments:

Alastair said...

I thought I read somewhere that the Leopard VNC implementation relied on IPsec for security - it should be theoretically possible to provide this on your Linux box... ?

Anonymous said...

Great tip about vnc://! You can also open Screen Sharing directly. It's located here: /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app

Anonymous said...

Glad the performance is good for you. Connection to my workstation at work (over SSH tunnel), it runs much more sluggishly than JollysFastVNC, but also without the latter's numerous bugs.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this. I was searching for a VNC client for the Mac (I'm new to Mac) and your post showed up. It is snappier on the iMAC than my PC.

Thanks,

Rick

Peter Marks said...

My pleasure. Great work on BBEdit by the way.

:-) just kidding!

Mikael said...

But how do I send a CTRL-ALT-DEL to unlock my remote Windoze-macine?

Anonymous said...

I prefer the built-in Screen Sharing.app over other clients. It's not as full featured in some ways, but my connection survives through reboots of the server, and it's reasonably fast and stable.

Anonymous said...

If you need to send CTL-ALT-DEL then the key sequence is a five finger operation (I'm not kidding), FN-CTL-ALT-COMMAND-DEL

Mikael said...

Gee... Thanks. And by DEL I hope you mean Backspace, or am I stucked on a MacBook?

Uncle Baby said...

@Mikael

On your notebook it should be as geoffs said:

fn+ctrl+alt+apple+backspace

On the MacBooks fn+backspace = Del.

Mikael said...

Thanks both!
//MiK