This is where the problem comes in: I don't own a Mac and don't intend to, so I need to connect to my bosses' Mac in order to perform testing. How can I connect to a Mac display ? X11 connection won't work, since my application is a Mac application and not a X11 one. I had him turn on screen sharing (the most basic tick box), which sets up a VNC server on the Mac. Unfortunately, when I connect using the command-line VNC clients available for debian, ie vncviewer (from the packages xvnc4viewer or xtightvncviewer), I get the following problems:
~ vncviewer chrismac VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.1 for X - built Mar 10 2010 22:31:05 Copyright (C) 2002-2005 RealVNC Ltd. See http://www.realvnc.com for information on VNC. Wed Dec 7 10:40:41 2011 CConn: connected to host chrismac port 5900 CConnection: Server supports RFB protocol version 3.889 CConnection: Using RFB protocol version 3.8 CConnection: No matching security types main: No matching security types
The good news is that remmina is able to connect graphically, although for me it required that I set the display depth to 24 bits (else it seems to connect, but the connection dies immediately). Great, I'll be able to debug, then...
Edit: after a while, I found out that remmina had some drawbacks when connecting to a Mac, such as, at least in my case, a weird problem with Shift: once I hit Shift, I'm never able again to type in lowercase characters, which is quite painful. I tried also Vinagre, who handled that better (but had some quite painful freezing moment), so I must say that I finally found a client I'm happy with: gtkvncviewer.
2 comments:
Seriously I would not trust screen sharing (which is just a sort of VNC connection if I understand it well).
In order to connect to my parent's Mac from my Linux box I use vnc over ssh :
* I opened the ssh sharing on their MacOS X
* I installed a VNC Server on their MacOS X
* Each time I need to connect to the Mac host :
1. I establish a ssh tunnel from my Linux host to their MacOS X
2. I start a VNC server on the Mac host via ssh
3. I use xvnc4viewer in order to contact the VNC server through the ssh tunnel
On my host I use the following bash function to simplify the process (added in my $HOME/.bashrc)...
vnc_host ()
{
# $1 = user@hostname
user=$(echo $1 | cut -d @ -f 1)
host=$(echo $1 | cut -d @ -f 2)
ssh ${user}@${host} startvncserver
VNC_VIA_CMD='ssh -f -L "$L":"$H":"$R" "$G" ; sleep 20' xvnc4viewer -FullScreen -PreferredEncoding=ZRLE -via ${user}@${host} localhost
ssh ${user}@${host} stopvncserver
}
...which uses the two following functions added in the $HOME/.bashrc of the Mac OS X :
function startvncserver ()
{
launchctl submit -l vncserver -o /tmp/vncserver.log -e /tmp/vncserver.log -- /Applications/Utilities/Vine\ Server.app/OSXvnc-server -rfbnoauth -disableScreenSaver -keyboardLoading yes -pressModsForKeys yes -localhost
sleep 2
}
function stopvncserver ()
{
launchctl remove vncserver
rm -f /tmp/vncserver.log
}
Thanks for the recommendations, I now need to manage Macs remotely and had a lot of trouble finding a client that works reasonably well over low bandwidth.
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