VNC contributed stuff

Building the source code on other platforms & environments

We prefer not to distribute binaries for platforms we cannot test here, but several people have contributed source code modifications or hints to allow VNC to compile under different platforms and with various other modifications. Please note that we cannot officially endorse or be responsible for these but we are grateful to all the contributors. We may try and incorporate some of these in a future source code release.

Building the old version 3.3.1

Many people ported part or all of the VNC 3.3.1 distribution to other Unix platforms. We hope that the 3.3.2 release based on XFree86 will have solved some of the issues they discovered and should be easier to port. To avoid confusion, therefore, we have moved the patches and other info which we think relate chiefly to 3.3.1 onto an 'old contributions' page. We will reserver this page for information relating to 3.3.2 and to non-Unix platforms, but if you have problems you make like to refer to the old page as well.

It's worth pointing out that the protocol has not changed between these releases, so you should have no trouble connecting a 3.3.2 viewer to a 3.3.1 server or vice versa.

Linux RPMs & Debian packages

Other people have kindly packaged VNC up in RPM and Debian package form; see for example under 'V' at the RPM archive http://rufus.w3.org/linux/RPM/ and at www.debian.org . Note that these may not be identical to the standard ORL distributions, and may not be updated as frequently, so you should check the main ORL site frequently.

AIX

Chuck Hines <chuck_hines@VNET.IBM.COM> writes:

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's patch is available here: vnc-3.3.2-aix.patch.txt .

Acorn RISC OS

We know of two viewers for 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/

BSDI

Kurt Seel <kseel@utcorp.com> writes:

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!

DOS

Marinos J. Yannikos <mjy@pobox.com> has written a VNC viewer which runs under DOS, using packet drivers and the Waterloo TCP/IP library along with the Allegro graphics library. The whole system including the IP stack fits comfortably on a floppy disk. You can get it from http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/nino/dosvnc.html .

FreeBSD

Joe Evans <evans@ittc.ukans.edu> reports:

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.

HPUX

Karl Hakimian <hakimian@aha.com> writes:

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.

-- Cut here for patch --

*** osinit.c.old    Fri Jan 17 22:58:02 1997
--- osinit.c    Fri May 22 11:46:04 1998
***************
*** 66,71 ****
--- 66,75 ----
#include <sys/resource.h>
#endif

+ #ifdef hpux
+ #include <sys/resource.h>
+ #endif
+ 
#ifndef ADMPATH
#define ADMPATH "/usr/adm/X%smsgs"
#endif
*** utils.c.old    Mon Mar 2 03:56:36 1998
--- utils.c    Fri May 22 11:46:33 1998
***************
*** 77,82 ****
--- 77,85 ----
#endif
#if !defined(SYSV) && !defined(AMOEBA) && !defined(_MINIX) && !defined(WIN32) && !defined(Lynx)
#include <sys/resource.h>
+ #ifdef hpux
+ #include <sys/resource.h>
+ #endif
#endif
#include <time.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>

-- Cut here for patch --

--
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.

SPARC Linux

James Hall <jhall1@isd.net> writes:

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.

SunOS 4.1.3

We've had reports that this buiilds without any problems if you use gcc.

OpenStep/Mach

David Young (dwy@picasso.eng.ace.net) writes:

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.

Windows NT/Alpha

John Ross Hunt <hunt@lbpc.com> writes:

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.

--John Ross Hunt, Law Bulletin Publishing Company

Cygwin32

Valery Tulnikov has built the server and viewer under Cygwin-32, based on the 3.3.1 patches by Sergey Okhapkin. This allows you to run the X viewer and server under Win32. Yes, there are some good reasons why you might want to do this! See http://www.dol.ru/users/valtul/ for more info.

BeOS

Andreas F. Bobak writes:

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

MacOS (alternative)

Dair Grant <dair@dircon.co.uk> has modified an early version of our Macintosh viewer to support Appearances Manager and Navigation Services, which means it looks more attractive on recent versions of MacOS. You can find it at http://www.kagi.com/dair/vnc .

Firewalls

Karl Harkimian <hakimian@aha.com> sent in a patch to compile the Unix viewer so that it can reach external servers through a SOCKS firewall. It's very simple, and the patch is here: socks-patch.txt. These patches apply to 3.3.1 but they are simple enough to apply by hand to later versions.

Obviously, you cannot access a server inside a firewall from outside without specially configuring the firewall; that's what firewalls are for! Christian A. Lademann cal@zls.de has used an elaborate scheme:

I have had a problem with connections from my workstation to a PC connected to a customers LAN, because my firewall as well as the customers firewall does IP-masquerading. This means that my workstation can only connect to the customers firewall and the customers PC can only connect to my
firewall. The reason for this is, of course, to hide the complete LAN behind the firewall(s).

Christian's solution involved a script listening on a single accessible well-known port behind the firewall, which could accept incoming connections and redirect them to the appropriate machine. His full details are here: rvnc.txt

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

Ganesh Varadarajan and Sitaram Iyer have built a vncviewer which runs from a Linux console using the svgalib library. You will need to install svgalib and configure /etc/vga/libvga.config for your graphics card. 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, I think. Note that 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 authors wrote:

This is a alpha port of vncviewer to svgalib based on the [3.3.1] X client.
You no longer need to start X to use vnc ! Even that old 4MB 386 which you've got in the corner can be used as an X terminal. It can also be used on a single-floppy Linux - not quite the answer to the QNX challenge, but good enough for me.

Some hints on getting svncviewer working for you :

First of all make sure your card is supported by svgalib at the higher resolutions like 640x480x256. Otherwise you can only use 320x200x256
Sometimes svgalib incorrectly detects the card or doesn't detect it at all and defaults to the VGA driver. In this case you might have to edit /etc/vga/libvga.config (this is Redhat's svgalib config, your distribution might have it elsewhere) and uncomment the line corresponding to your chipset. Cards I've had trouble autodetecting: Cirrus Logic 5446 - uncomment the chipset Cirrus line. Trident TVGA 8900 - incorrectly detected as Mach64. uncomment TVGA. Chips and Technologies - add the line chipset C&T
(Note: It seems some distributions don't have svgalib compiled with C&T support. You might need to recompile svgalib).
If you get something like read error: broken pipe, it means the remote Xvnc has closed the connection, usually because the client's parameters like bpp are not acceptable. Check out the Xvnc logs.
There is a workaround in svga.c which disables use of acceleration. You might want to comment out NO_ACCEL and see if acceleration works.
If your mouse doesn't work, make sure that /dev/mouse is rw-able by you. This is because svgalib opens the mouse O_RDWR and we give up suid perms immediately after vga_init and before opening the mouse. Redhat's default is 660, you might want to make this 666.

TODO:

The viewer is not flexible about selection of graphics mode. It selects the closest possible to the server geometry/depth. It bails out if a resolution = server geometry is not available.
Only the std. keymap works, for other keyboards you might have to hack keys.h which maps Linux keycodes (different from X keycodes) to X keysyms.
Mouse middle button doesn't work (svgalib problem ?)
Keyboard LEDs

Please mail bug reports/patches etc. to ganesh@cse.iitb.ernet.in
In your bug report, please include the following information:
Linux distribution, kernel version, svgalib version.
Graphics card and whether other svgalib apps work at *high* resolutions.
What parameters Xvnc was started with.
What parameters were used for svncviewer.
Exact error messages, snippets from log files where applicable.

For the latest in svnc, check http://www.cse.iitb.ernet.in/~sitaram/vnc

Lastly, a BIG thank you to the ORL guys for making vnc freely available. VNC rules !

Ganesh Varadarajan <ganesh@cse.iitb.ernet.in>
Sitaram Iyer <sitaram@cse.iitb.ernet.in>

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

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

Karl Heinz Kremer khk@cyberdude.com has created a single-floppy linux distribution which includes svncviewer. You can now use an old 486 without even a hard disk as an X display. See http://www.stuttgart.netsurf.de/~khk/lods.html for details

GGI

Steve Cheng steve@ggi-project.org writes:

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.

ORL has 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.

KDE viewer

Markus Wuebben markus.wuebben@kde.org has built a version of the viewer which fits nicely into the X-based KDE environment.

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

PalmPilot

Vladimir Minenko minenko@icsi.berkeley.edu has created a port of the VNC viewer for PalmOS 2.0 or higher.

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

Windows CE

We have a working version of the viewer running onWindows CE 2.0. It needs a fair bit of tidying before it's ready for distribution, but it should be available soon. Meanwhile, you can look at some pictures; click on them for a larger image:

This is certainly the smallest X terminal I've ever used!

OS/2

Bosse Nystr�m bosse@postman.riken.go.jp has built the 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/

SSLeay encryption

Ray Jones rjones@pobox.com has built a version of VNC which uses SSLeay public key encryption for a more secure connection.

You can get it from http://web.mit.edu/thouis/vnc .

zlib compression

Dave DeBarr (debarr@mitre.org) has modified the X server and viewer to use zlib-based compression. We plan to incorporate something similar in the standard release before long, but until then you can find his patches at:

http://www.orl.co.uk/vnc/archives/1998-08/0039.html

In addition, Dave has provided patches for the Windows viewer at:

http://www.orl.co.uk:80/vnc/archives/1998-08/0228.html

x2vnc

Here's a different twist to VNC. Fredrik Hubinette hubbe@hubbe.net has written a VNC-based variation on the popular x2x program. If you run x2vnc on an X server, you can move off the side of the screen and the mouse movements will then be sent to a VNC server (eg. a PC sitting beside it) He writes:

x2vnc is basically a stripped down version of the vncviewer but with slightly different goals and a very different GUI.. :)

x2vnc emulates a 'dual head' setup by catching when the user tries to move the pointer past the edge of the screen. This allows me to control
both computers from one mouse/keyboard.

I have made x2vnc available for download from my web site:

http://www.hubbe.net/~hubbe/x2vnc.html

For comments, feedback, etc, please see the 'Keeping in touch' page.
Copyright 1998 - The Olivetti & Oracle Research Lab

Virtual Network Computing from ORL