10.5: Use Chicken of the VNC with 10.5's Screen Sharing

Nov 23, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Pete222

I had been having some problems dealing with Leopard's Screen Sharing feature -- I wasn't able to remotely connect, no matter which ports I opened or prefs I turned on, using a machine from my job running 10.4.

I was attempting to connect with Chicken of the VNC (CotVNC), and according to a few articles across the web, it should have worked flawlessly. It certainly did on my network at home, so I wasn't sure what I was doing wrong. I even DMZ'd my machine at home -- still, nada.

Then I was playing around with the Profiles options in CotVNC, and there's a setting where you can change the resolution of the window on the client's end. The choices are 256 colors, Thousands, Millions, and Let Server Decide. I always had it set to 256 at work, because I was more interested in speed than how pretty my desktop looked from afar. However, I checked out my settings at home and I had the Let Server Decide option selected.

Aha -- I was on to something. I got to work this morning, changed the resolution in the profile settings to Thousands, and sure enough, CotVNC works like a charm again. It also worked fine with Let Server Decide. 256 colors worked perfectly with Tiger, but I'm guessing there's something with Leopard's built-in screen sharing that's not allowing a VNC client to connect at that low of a resolution. Just thought I'd share my findings for anyone possibly having the same difficulties.

Comments (10)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20071109130303999