VNC on other platforms & environments

Linux RPMs & Debian packages

AIX

For anyone trying to build the latest version of VNC under AIX 4.1.5 may be interested in the patch below which contains the quick and dirty changes I needed to do to be able to comple and link successfully (hopefully I didn't miss anything). Things went pretty smoothly after these minor changes and it seems to be running fine.Basically the patch adds the necessary AIX sys/select.h inclusion where needed, removes the X11R6 specific stuff, and forces sys/resource.h to be included. That last one left me sort of puzzled,as the way it was trying to build should have not tried including it at all (which should have been fine), but it looked like os/osinit.c WASN'T including it while os/utils.c WAS for some unknown reason (andthe #if logic looked correct to me in both files) creating undefinedsymbols.

-- Chuck

Chuck has set up a small web site with details and binaries available. See http://www.idsi.net/~bshma/chuck/vnc.html .

Acorn RISC OS

The first, created by simon@bigblue.demon.co.uk, is available from http://www.bigblue.demon.co.uk/VNC.html .

The second, by Leo White <leo@brighteyes.u-net.com> is at http://www.brighteyes.u-net.com/ .

A server for RISC OS is also available from http://www.interconnex.co.uk/~paul/

Amiga

Stéphane Guillard - stephane.guillard@steria.fr writes:

I have set up a (incomplete, but usable) Amiga VNC server, which can be found on Aminet (http://de.aminet.net), as comm/tcp/AmiVNC.lha (ie. here).

This is a work in progress.

BeOS

Yesterday, I made a first port of the VNC viewer to the BeOS. I mixed together the Win32 viewer and the Unix viewer and added a bunch of BeOS specific stuff. It basically works but perfomance does scream. RRE encoding is broken and Hextile encoding has a strange bug, but it's usable with just CoRRE and CopyRect.

A snapshot of the sources and a x86 binary can be found under http://abstrakt.ch/be/

Cheers
    -boby

-- Andreas F. Bobak  bobak@relog.ch

BSDI

vnc compiles cleanly on bsdi 3.0 (no patches) with the following
pecuiarity - socket.c and httpd.c had to be ifdef'ed like so :

#ifdef __bsdi__
#undef _ANSI_SOURCE
#endif
#include <sys/time.h>
#ifdef __bsdi__
#define _ANSI_SOURCE 1
#endif

It seems to work fine. The switch to xfree 3.3.2 really did some good here!

Cygwin32

DOS

FreeBSD

I compiled the VNC stuff on FreeBSD 2.2.5, and it seems to work fine. The only compile glitch was that you need to remove the gnumalloc library from the extra libraries list in order to do the link step.

Bruce Mah < bmah@ca.sandia.gov > adds:

vnc is now a part of the FreeBSD ports collection...on FreeBSD 2.2.7-RELEASE or newer with an installed ports collection, the installation process is simply:

  cd /usr/ports/net/vnc
  make install

Geos (eg. Nokia 9000)

I have just uploaded the first public version of the VNC Viewer for Geos
to my home page. Have a look at

    http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/mgroeber/nokia.htm

It allows you to access VNC servers from machines running Geos 3.0,
which would be either a Nokia 9000/9000i/9110 Communicator, a desktop PC
running NewDeal Office 3.0, or a Brother GeoBook notebook.

Enjoy!

GGI

libGGI is a portable graphics library with a flexible design.  See <http://www.ggi-project.org> for details.   The graphics application can betransparently "retargeted" to different types of displays including X11, Linux svgalib and fbcon. (Win32 soon to come.) The VNC targets adds the VNC protocol to this list.  You can even run doom over VNC! :-) 

Standand VNC clients can be used with the VNC target/GGI application as the server.

You can get it here: <http://shell.ipoline.com/~elmert/vnc.tar.gz> 

Untar it under degas/lib/libggi of the GGI devel tree. (The stable GGI tree won't work because of namespace changes,etc.)

A long while ago someone wanted a "stripped-down version of the server part - one that skips listening/authentication phase and just uses stdin/stdout for the communication (run-once application)."  This is not currently done yet, but I have made it easy to do so.  The only problem is the libGGI application trying to use stdin/stdout.

[The VNC team] have asked me not to distribute this as part of libGGI (yet). (It has GPL'd code; the other parts are LGPL as the rest of LibGGI).  So it won't be
in the GGI CVS tree now.

Bug reports, fixes, and feedback welcome.

HP/UX

Several contributors here. We'll thin these out soon.

Stephen Walton <stephen.walton@csun.edu> who previously posted a detailed message entitled Building VNC 3.3.3 on HP-UX 10.20 has now also provided some HP/UX binaries. These are available at: http://www.csun.edu/~swalton/VNC. Stephen sent us this README

Karl Hakimian <hakimian@aha.com> wrote about his experiences building 3.3.2:

HPUX did not go as smoothly as some of the other OS's that have been reported, but I did manage to get things to compile under hpux 10.20.

First I had to change Xvnc/config/cf/hp.cf

Same as for 3.3.1, I made sure the following were set

#define ExtensionOSDefines -DHPINPUT # -DXTESTEXT1
#define XhpServer NO
#define BuildXInputExt NO

#define BuildPex NO
#define BuildPexExt NO
#define XvncServer YES

I also had to change the following to NO
#define NeedBerklib NO

That got things most of the way compiled. I then could not link Xvnc becuase of several missing objects

limitNoFile
limitDataSpace
limitStackSpace

Turns out I just needed to include sys/resource.h to two files in the programs/Xserver/os directory, the following patch takes care of that. (Karl's short patch is here)

Karl Hakimian
hakimian@aha.com

And Mike Cooke writes:

Just to inform you I've managed to build the vnc suite on the following HP box HP-UX <name> B.10.20 E 9000/879

I had major problems trying to build it with the standard HP tools and after much head banging and source editing, I decided to forget it and switch to gcc which worked after about the 3'rd build. I applied the patches as advised in the contrib section on your site.

The only further problem I had was getting the Xvnc server to recognize the correct fonts - somehow the aliasing config here seems a bit odd, so to get around that problem I just ran the x font server and it solved all the problems.

And Ulrik Dickow <ukd@kampsax.dk> adds:

This evening I succesfully built vnc-3.3.2r3 on HP/UX 10.20 9000/712 with the
HP ANSI C compiler.  I first naïvely tried

  xmkmf
  make World
  cd Xvnc
  make World

without any modifications to the source files, but this gave lots of errors
in the Xvnc compilation.  Then I changed hp.cf with Karls modifications from
vnc/platforms.html and changed the two C files that his "short patch"
mentions (but in a slightly improved way).  This compiled succesfully, with
only harmless warnings.  To make it easier for others to build on HP/UX 10,
I've attached the resulting "jumbo patch" to this mail.

It would be even easier if the changes were permanently done to the master
source.  They don't affect other platforms than HP/UX, and I guess they'll
help HP/UX 9 and 11 users too, won't they?

To complete the help for fellow HP/UX'ers, the second attached patch modifies
a few lines of the vncserver Perl script to

  a) start a CDE session if possible, otherwise fall back to the old code

  b) set the `-fp' argument reasonably for HP/UX (the CDE script will add
     more to this path).

Due to b), the second patch should *not* be applied to the general
distribution, although a) might be.

If somebody have problems with these plaintext unified diffs, I can provide
context diffs instead, possibly in base64 or uuencoded form.  I start out
with unified diffs, since they are much shorter and much more readable in
this case.  Apply them in the top vnc source directory like this:

  patch -p1 < vnc-3.3.2r3_unix.ukd-kh-hpux-patch
  patch -p1 < vnc-3.3.2r3_unix.ukd-hpux_specific-patch.txt

Long live GNU patch(1) (http://www.gnu.org/).

Thanks to ORL for conceiving a great product, and to Karl for finding out how
to compile it on HP/UX 10.  BTW, I compiled on a machine with these bundles
installed, as part of an upgrade from 9.0x:

  B3393AA_APZ B.10.20.02 HP-UX Developer's Toolkit for 10.0 Series 700 
  B3898AA_APZ B.10.20.02 HP C/ANSI C Developer's Bundle for HP-UX 10.20 (S700) 
  B3910BA_APZ A.01.00    HP aC++ Compiler S700 
 

Ulrik's patches are at 
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/contrib/vnc-3.3.2r3_unix.ukd-kh-hpux-patch
and
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/contrib/vnc-3.3.2r3_unix.ukd-hpux_specific-patch.txt

Ulrik also pointed out that some HPUX distributions don't include xmkmf and imake, but that you can get both source and binaries for them from http://hpux.csc.liv.ac.uk/hppd/hpux/X11/Core/imake-5.06/.

HP Jornada

See Windows CE below

KDE

See http://studserver.uni-dortmund.de/~su0197/kde/kvnc/ for details.

LinuxPPC

MacOS (alternative)

NetBSD

NetWinder

I've "ported" the server and client portions of your VNC package to our NetWinder platform (an ARM-based linux system).  There are only minor changes necessary that stem from the fact that your package tries to rebuild "imake" itself - but is isn't aware of the arm platform.  I've attached the patch below; it is against vnc-3.3.2r3 for unix. 
... We'll be providing binaries from our web site for NetWinder owners..

Ralph's patch is available at http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/contrib/netwinder-patch.txt

Nokia 9000

Oberon

John Stout and Andre Fischer wrote to tell us of an Oberon VNC viewer. Andre writes:

We have also written an Oberon VNC client that is now used on most of our laboratory PCs. A first glance can be taken from http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/native/vnc/ .

The software is at ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/Oberon/System3/Contrib/VNC/

Note: The VNC01.Arc is an (proprietary) Oberon archive to install in Oberon. You will find installation and usage instructions in http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/install.html.

And John said...

...it should give a reasonable system for low end machines. It needs what's called the Gadgets system so I don't think it would run off a single floppy, but certainly lower requirements than W95, MacOS, etc. There is a Native Oberon implementation for Linux so I assume it should work under that.

The link is at:

OpenBSD

I've a slight gripe in that on the IPX at least, "make install" puts loads of stuff into /usr/lib/X11/config* which already existed in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/config. I imagine that's desirable if there isn't already an X server installation but scary if there is (and it had used the correct directory).

OpenStep/Mach

I've written a client for OPENSTEP/Mach (that spiffy NeXT OS) for VNC.

It currently supports display at 24, 12, and 8 bpp, mouse and mostly-functional keyboard input (ASCII and control characters work; the mapping isn't yet complete and I'm looking for suggestions on how to complete it), and some other client-side niceties. Encodings other than raw are on their way, as is NSPasteboard integration.

I'm looking for users (preferably with VNC and OPENSTEP experience) who can bang on this client on original NeXT boxes, Intel machines, or SPARCstations running OPENSTEP 4.2, or just people who might find it useful at this early state.

OS/2

Bosse Nyström bosse@postman.riken.go.jp has built the X viewer for OS/2 using XFree86. He writes:

I compiled the unix [3.3.1] sources with the attached diffs and got a working viewer under OS2 with XFree86 (and EMX).

I tested it with servers for OSF and Win32 (rev 16),   some problems with National characters for the win server otherwise it works fine.

-- Bosse

You can get Bosse's version from his FTP server at ftp://bfs.riken.go.jp/pub/vnc/, or from Ted Sikoras site at http://powerusersbbs.com/ports/ under XFreeOS2.
 

OSF

I have put the OSF binaries, java classes along with the original copyright at:

ftp://public.arl.arizona.edu/pub/sware/vnc-current_osf.tgz

Should work fine with Digital UNIX 4.0.

Since we will be using OSF, I will make sure that the lastest version of VNC OSF binaries are available at this URL.

PalmPilot

You can get PalmVNC from http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~minenko/PalmVNC

RedHat Linux 6.0

If you have difficulties running vncserver on RH6, check at least the following:

• Install the 100dpi fonts from the RedHat distribution if not already installed.
• Check the font path in the vncserver script.
• Check the permissions on /tmp/.X11-unix as mentioned in the FAQ under 'Why can I only run Xvnc as root?'.

SCO OpenServer

You can find his message at http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/contrib/sco-openserver.txt .

SGI Irix 6.2

The following small patch was all that was necessary for me to successfully compile Xvnc on SGI Irix 6.2 with the N32 binary format. A binary is available at ftp://ftp.dent.med.uni-muenchen.de/pub/wmglo/.

Wolfram's patch is available at http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/contrib/vnc-irix6.2-patch.txt .

SGI Irix 6.4 and 6.5

cd ./Xvnc ; make BOOTSTRAPCFLAGS=-DFIXUP_CPP_WHITESPACE World

SPARC Linux

Just thought I would let you know: VNC 3.3.2r2 compiles just fine on Linux/SPARC. I am using it now to run Word and Lotus Notes without
having to go back to my office and use my Windows 95 PC.

To compile, I just ran the 'configure' script, then typed 'make'.  I think I got a few warnings during the compile (mostly unused variables) but VNC runs fine.  This was on Red Hat Linux/SPARC 4.x, so I didn't have glibc. Don't know if that makes a difference.

Shinji Hattori writes:

I could not find a VNC package for Sparc Linux. So I made small patch and compiled on Redhat 5.2 sparc. Xvnc works fine.

You can download his patch here.

SunOS 4.1.3

SVGALIB (Linux without an X server) & Single-floppy Linux

One of the very first VNC viewer ports was done by Ganesh Varadarajan and Sitaram Iyer. They built a vncviewer which runs directly from a Linux console using the SVGALIB library.  You will need to install svgalib and configure /etc/vga/libvga.config for your graphics card. This can be a bit fiddly - the vgatest program which comes with the svgalib distribution can sometimes help, and check the setup using another svgalib program such as zgv if you have problems with the viewer.

The viewer doesn't do any scaling or scrolling, so the desktop you connect to must be of a resolution supported by your SVGALIB setup. Try creating servers of different geometries and connecting to them - if your svgalib setup doesn't work for one resolution it may work for another.  Persevere - this has a lot of potential. You can use it to make a very lightweight graphics terminal with reasonable performance on low-end hardware.

The current version will not generally be able to connect to Windows servers, because it requests a palette-based display which the Windows server cannot generate.

The sources for svncviewer are here: svnc-0.1.tgz  Remember that you will need both X and the VNC sources on your machine to build it, though you won't need them to run it!

Single-floppy Linux

VMS

Windows CE

Windows NT/Alpha

Binaries and VC++ project files are now available for Alpha NT WinVNC3.3.2. You can download them from: ftp://ftp.lawbulletin.com/vnc/ You will probably have better luck downloading with a standard FTP client instead of using a web browser (it's a firewall issue). We plan to upgrade soon, but until then, the old-fashioned way works best.