I was discussing with a co-worker the other day about how we have no room to set up multiple machines with multiple monitors and keyboards and he mentioned using VNC to use one of the machines as a controller of the other.

Duh. I'm an idiot.

I've had a Linux server running next to my Mac for about 6 months now with no way to use it except switching the monitor and moving around a bunch of equiptment on my desk. That's a pain and I would often play on it one day and then let it sit for month without being touched. When Rob talked about putting a VNC server on it, obviousness slapped me in the face. So this weekend I set it up.

On the Linux box, I'm running the wonderful Mepis Linux distro. To get a VNC server up and running, go into a command line and run:


sudo apt-get install vncserver vnc-common


After that installs, run:


vncserver -geometry 800x600


If this is the first time running it, it will ask for a password. Put in one you'll remember and hit enter. It will then tell you what "display" it's running on and you can use that to connect to it.

Now go to your Mac and download Chicken of the VNC. It's super easy to setup and works really well with everything. Start it up and connect to the Linux box. The linux box would have said something like this:


New 'X' desktop is Mepis:1


You can also connect using the IP address of the Linux box, like 192.168.1.102:1.

Voila, you are running! It looks just like Virtual PC. As long as your mouse is in the VNC window, all keystrokes and mouse clicks go to the Linux box. It works great and, over a local network, the latency is usually negligible.

You can do this with Windows to Mac, Mac to Linux, Windows to Linux, Linux to Windows and many, many more. Other software will be required but there is free VNC software for every type of machine that you can think of.

When you want to stop the VNC server, use:


vncserver -kill :1


I want to set this up so the VNC server starts when the machine boots up so I don't have to start it by hand every time. I'll post more when I figure something out.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2005 at 3:40 pm by Joe and is filed under General, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.