Dumb question about headless & Nebraska

Tom tmb at lumo.com
Mon Apr 2 20:22:06 UTC 2001


On Mon, Apr 02, 2001 at 02:50:57PM -0400, Mark Guzdial wrote:
> We've tried this with our servers, and we find VNC support on Macs 
> (servers and clients) to be pretty buggy.  The same client worked 
> fine on one PowerMac, but not on the next.  Some of our mac servers 
> worked as VNC servers, some only showed part of a screen.  We gave up.

Those are not problems with the VNC protocol and don't reflect on
the feasibility of running Squeak over VNC.

I don't know why the Mac clients would be buggy other than that it may
not be well maintained. Given that MacOS X supposedly has a good Java
implementation, you could just use the Java client, which works
reliably and reasonably efficiently.

The Mac server probably tries to grab bits from the frame buffer.
That's hard if the graphics system can't be instrumented. That's the
reason why putting VNC directly into Squeak (at the same level as the
current X11 support) would be nice.

However, another way of getting decent VNC support for Squeak
under MacOS is to do the same thing people do on UNIX: run Xvnc
on MacOS and compile Squeak not with the MacOS graphics stuff
but with an X11 interface under MacOS.

Cheers,
Thomas.





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