How to connect to your Mac from your Linux box
In a move that will surprise anybody who knows me, I’ve installed Mac OSX 10.5.2 on a Dell PC I had sitting around my office. As a side note, I was shocked at how easy it is to achieve this. I did not run into a single problem and the entire process took less than two hours from deciding I wanted to do it to having a bootable Hackintosh.
One of the first things I did was set up Screen Sharing, the Mac equivalent of remote desktop. Screen sharing is just a Macified name for VNC server which ships with OS X which means that once the server is started any VNC client should be able to connect to it. The following are instructions on how to set up Screen Sharing and connect to it from a Linux box.
Setting up the Mac
- On the Mac, Click on the Apple in the corner and launch System Preferences
- From there click sharing
- Click the check mark next to “Screen Sharing” this will start the VNC server.
- In theory this is all you need to do. However many clients will fail with errors like “No matching Security Types” To get around this, enable vnc password-based authentication by clicking Computer Settings and clicking the checkbox next to: “VNC viewers may control screen with password:”.
Connecting from Linux
After following these instructions the Mac should be all set as a server. So any vnc client should be able to talk to it. On my Linux box I tried TightVNC and RealVNC:
- TightVNC: Worked by simply typing xtightvncviewer ip.of.mac.box. However, I found the performance pretty poor.
- RealVNC: The window updates slightly quicker than TightVNC, however by default it is unable to connect to the Mac because of a problem detecting the color settings of the vnc server. So the command line to use it is
vncviewer FullColor=1 ip.of.mac.box
In order to make the experience more palatable I recommend changing your background to a solid color. This will make a significant difference in usability. If you are using the box only as a vnc server I would also recommend changing the number of colors to as small a number as you are willing to deal with.
Comment by Tarmo Toikkanen on 30 May 2008:
Thanks, this was just the information I was looking for - ran into the first error you mentioned, the non-matching security types, and then RealVNC just died after authenticating, which got fixed with the FullColor=1 parameter. Thanks again!