Helping Windows Users with UltraVNC Single Click and ssvnc from Linux

If you ever (try to) use UltraVNC Single Click to help Windows users from Linux, you will find out that it's not that easy. Though you can use the UltraVNC viewer in Wine, you may see disconnects after around 15 minutes. The easy solution lies in starting a regular TightVNC with these parameters:

xtightvncviewer -listen 0 -encodings "hextile copyrect"

Replace the 0 with the display number, e.g. 0 for port 5500 or 400 for 5900. (port = 5500 + x) You need to have the package xtightvncviewer installed for this to work in Ubuntu. The color parameter does not work properly in this configuration.

Or give ssvnc a try. It works even with SCIII (uvnc Single Click via SSL), supports different color depths and much more!

And if you've got a current wine version, you might as well use the original ultravnc viewer. It works fine by now.

I usually use ssvn and the following script to start the vnc listener and quit it when finished.
VNC=$HOME/src/ssvnc/bin/tightvncviewer
$VNC -listen 487 -use64 & # 64 colors
read -p "Press enter when finished"
killall tightvncviewer vncviewer

7 comments:

  1. Also, since today, SSVNC (enhanced tightvnc viewer) works with SC without special arguments. It has a experimental support for chat window and file transfert :

    http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/ssvnc.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks a lot for the hint!

    I still wish there was a port of UltraVNC to linux...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Would be nice :) But if ssvnc improves his ultravnc compatibility, I think that the final result will be the same. As long as there is a good viewer which works :)

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  4. So your viewer will work with the actual uvnc encoding and not restrict the compatibility list as in my blog above? That's really pretty cool then!

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  5. Yes it already does! No need to use special encodings. I'm not sure that ssvnc uses all encodings specific to uvnc, but it's by far the most compatible and complete vnc viewer for unix/linux.

    Karl J. Runge did make a real good job to make it compatible. He fixed most of the bug with ultravnc compatibility in the last week. This is now pretty stable.

    I did some work on packaging and debian is planning to include ssvnc in their repositories, so it will probably be in ubuntu repositories for intrepid + 1 :)

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  6. It turns out that it didn't really work for me. The connection was fine, but I couldn't reduce the color depth. And that was my major problem with the other solutions I posted above.

    Also ssvnc does not seem to be prepared for simple listening, it wants me to use ssh or ssl. But what I need is a plain old unencrypted connection. (Of course this is possible by directly using the vncviewer application that comes with it.)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Turns out I didn't test well...

    It works quite nicely. Of course it's not as fast as UltraVNC's original viewer, which works fine in current WINE versions.

    ReplyDelete

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