Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

Launching VNC

If you installed VNC on your Mac OS X system via Fink (or on any Unix system for that matter), you can start the VNC server by issuing the following command:

vncserver

If you don’t have physical access to the system on which you want to run the VNC server, you can login into it remotely and enter the command before logging out:

nohup vncserver

This starts the VNC server, and nohup makes sure that it continues to run after you log out. In either case, the first time you start vncserver, you need to supply a password, which you need anyway when connecting from a remote machine. (This password can be changed using the command vncpasswd.) You can run several servers; each server is identified by its hostname with a :number appended. For example, suppose you start the VNC server twice on a machine named abbott; the first server is identified as abbott:1 and the second as abbott:2. You need to supply this identifier when you connect from a client machine.

By default, the VNC server runs twm. So, when you connect, you will see an X11 desktop instead of Mac OS X’s desktop. You can specify a different window manager in ~/.vnc/xstartup. To terminate the VNC server, use the following command syntax:

                  vncserver -kill :
                  
                     display
                  

For example, to terminate abbott:1, you would issue the following command while logged into abbott as the user who started the VNC server:

vncserver -kill :1

VNC and SSH

VNC passwords and network traffic are sent over the wire as plaintext. However, you can use ...