Leopard's built-in VNC server doesn't quite work

It would be great -- if it worked. Paul Holbrook notes in his blog:
Mac OS 10.5 has a VNC server built in to allow remote access back to your Mac. Many sites have claimed that standard VNC clients will work with Mac OS VNC.
Mr. Holbrook reports some success with Windows on the LAN, but nothing from a remote client. I haven't had any luck connecting over the LAN using the Linux command line client, xvncviewer. I get the following error:
main: End of stream
It's not the firewall, since the superb Vine Server 3.0 for Mac OS X 10.4 & 10.5 worked like a champ: I installed it on my Leopard machine, and then connected immediately with xvncviewer over the LAN. I'll let you know if I get the remote connection going.

Comments

Anonymous said…
hi there,

I've just encountered the same problem and found your blog looking for a solution.

Just a heads up, I ended up using xtightvncviewer. I'm not sure what distro you're using, but you can apt-get it in Debian and probably debian based distro's too.

Anyway, hope that helps.
Neil said…
Lee,

Thanks for your suggestion for a good VNC client for Linux computers. I found that running Vine Server on the Mac lets me connect to my Mac using pretty much any VNC client I like, unlike Apple's offering -- even though they are based on the same underlying VNC server technology.

I also like to be able to launch the server from the command line. This way, I can log in to the Mac server using SSH and then launch the Vine Server even if it’s not running already, using the following command:

/Applications/Vine\ Server.app/OSXvnc-server

Of course, for this to work, the firewall needs to be configured correctly on the Mac server to allow both SSH and VNC connections. But this means I don’t need to have the Vine server running all the time, since I can launch it on an as-needed basis.
Dimarc67 said…
Just FYI...

For some time now, I've been using VNC Viewer Free Edition 4.1.2 for Windows with OS X's built-in VNC server in both Tiger and Leopard. It's a bit quirky at times (unexpected disconnects, video freezes, etc.), but nothing that can't be worked around, and it's actually been more stable with Leopard. I regularly use it through SSL VPN tunnels quite effectively.

Dimarc67
New York, NY
Anonymous said…
xvncviewer -noauto hostname
Anonymous said…
I got this same problem.

I fixed it by selecting Options and "Full Color" on VNCViewer for the PC.

I'm using the RealVNC Free Client software.
Anonymous said…
I tried the full color options on my Linux version of vncviewer (select Options from the initial screen) and it worked for me too.

-- gerald
Brad said…
Pat, setting to full colour worked for me thanks, using xvncviewer on Ubuntu. Problem was that on full colour it was way too slow, and that's within my own network.

I tried TightVNC and that worked out of the box just fine.
Unknown said…
Pat B: I owe you a beer (or whatever you drink). We've been trying for a week to solve this problem and setting the Full Color option fixed it. Thanks!
KernelManic said…
2011 update:

The situation seems like it hasn't changed for Ubuntu linux 'clients' and Mac VNC 'servers'

xtightvncviewer works fine.

Whereas xvncviewer and xvnc4viewer still halt with the "End of stream" error.
( I cant really go around installing Vine VNC on all of the Macs I need to connect to - but the ssh/vnc combo seems great. )

-KernelManic

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