Connecting to OS X Lion VNC Server

[muzicman82]

Hello all,

Since no other VNC servers seem to work with OS X Lion so far, I have enabled Screen Sharing on a Mac Mini. I can connect with UltraVNC Viewer 1.0.9.6.1 on Windows 7 just fine with the quality set to Auto. Given that I need to use this over the Internet, I would like it to work at 256 colors (Medium). When I try this, I get "Server Closed Connection - The server running as application".

Any ideas?

[B]

That's funny; that (very common) error is SUPPOSED to determine that the Windows VNC server is in application mode, which of course doesn't apply here at all.

Perhaps you could simply dial down the actual color depth of the target screen in OSX itself? (Or does that need to stay higher for the end-user?)

Also see how TightVNC Viewer does; I see they recently reworked their color encodings specifically involving (older) Macs.

[muzicman82]

Yeah, I'll try TightVNC. Does anyone know what compression settings OS X uses?

The color depth does need to stay higher for the local monitor.

[B]

The OSX internal VNC server doesn't seem very documented at all.

So you've had no luck with either VINES or x11vnc under OSX 10.7?

[muzicman82]

TightVNC does the same thing. Closes the connection after authentication when trying to connect at anything other than full color. Horribly slow over the web.

I used to use OSXvnc which doesn't work at all on Lion.

[B]

One workaround -- tunnel VNC in either SSH or a VPN -- the built-in compression of those techniques should help a lot.

[B]

The VINES developers are working on an upgrade. Apparently Apple killed most of the necessary APIs and is limiting their built-in server to only ZRLE encoding, which is why everything is so slow for you.

http://www.testplant.com/phpBB2/viewtop ... 1dab5d9fbc

We do plan to update Vine Server to work with Lion in the future -- but much of the core of Vine Server will need to be modified because the API's that are currently in use are deprecated in LION.

At this time we recommend using Apple Remote Desktop configured to allow VNC access.

A poster there said RealVNC viewer works, again slowly.

But have you infact tried x11vnc at all?

[B]

Someone at Apple's forums claims to have working (or perhaps temporary) fix

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16026896#16026896

via

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/31 ... 5&tstart=0



Or maybe not?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/32 ... 0&tstart=0

How to fix VNC, Apple Remote Desktop (ARD), and screen sharing in OS X 10.7 Lion.

You can skip all the other threads and just read this.



First let's fix the Lion computer.

1. Open System Preferences > Sharing
2. Turn OFF Screen Sharing, Remote Login, Remote Management, and Remote Apple Events (just turn everything off)
3. Now turn ON Screen Sharing, Remote Login, Remote Management, and Remote Apple Events
4. Now turn everything OFF again. We have just "kickstarted" those services.
5. Now enable the services you want. If you just want to access your computer through VNC or screen sharing, just turn on Screen Sharing.
6. If you want Windows computers to access it, go to Screen Sharing > Computer Settings, click the VNC checkbox, and enter a VNC password.



If you administer a bunch of computers with ARD, then turn Remote Managment on. If you don't know what that last sentence means, leave Remote Management and remote Apple Events off.



The computer should now work. If not, reboot it.



If it still doesn't work, then you should try downgrading to ARD 3.4, but I don't think this is necessary.





Let's access the Lion computer from another Mac:

1. From the other Mac, open /System/Library/Core Services/
2. There is an application called Screen Sharing. Make an alias of it (click and drag while holding Apple and Option) in the Applications folder. Or drag it to the Dock.
3. Now open the alias (or click the Dock icon).
4. Type in the Bonjour name or IP address of your computer.
5. Enter your OS X username and password.
6. Tell it to save your password.



Viola, now you can use this to connect to your Lion computer, without having to login twice. You can also connect to Windows computers running VNC with it.



You can also connect by going to the Finder and hitting Apple-K or going to the Finder menubar Go > Connect to Server and finding the correct server. That will then launch Screen Sharing.





Let's access the Lion computer from a Windows PC:

1. Open your VNC client
2. Enter the Lion computer IP address
3. Enter your VNC password
4. You will now have to re-login with your OS X user password (unless you get a Windows client that supports direct login, but I don't know of one at the moment)



Let's access the Lion computer from an iPhone or iPad:

You could download Screens from the Apple store or...

1. Download Mocha VNC Lite from the Apple store for free
2. Configure Mocha but enter not just the VNC password, but also the Mac OS X user and password
3. Viola, you can now VNC without logging in twice.







What did we actually do?

The key is called kickstarting ARD. You can find info here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2370, We did this manually by turning them on and then off.

This is like rebooting those systems. Once rebooted, they should work correctly. I don't believe that downgrading to ARD 3.4 is necessary, but instructions are here from Reubania https://discussions.apple.com/thread/31 ... 5&tstart=0 (towards the bottom).



The second issue is around double-login. If you run a multiuser machine, this is a great feature. For most people, it's annoying to login twice. By configuring the Screen Sharing and Mocha apps to use OS X authentication, we bypass this annoyance. If you want to have double login for multi-user reasons, simply don't setup/save your password, or save the password for the account you do want to login with.
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.1), Apple Remote Desktop