Idea: replace 10.x PPC VNC engine with TigerVNC?

[adespoton]

I haven't dug into it at all yet, but theoretically it should be possible to replace the VNC engine in OS X 10.x PPC (at least for 10.2 through 10.5) with the TigerVNC daemon.  This would give us a much more performant, encrypted, and feature-rich VNC server to use, and should still be backwards-compatible with ARD.

Thoughts?  Or should I just settle for getting TigerVNC running as a daemon on these systems?

 

[Cory5412]

I don't want to discourage you on this, but:

I'm curious - what's the use case here?

EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean what's the use case for using screen sharing/VNC on Mac OS X, that seems clear enough to me, my question is - what's the advantage/need of putting a newer VNC server on these older machines?

Just a couple weeks ago I started using VNC to drive "v2ls" - the mini that is eventually going to become vtools - from my main Windows PC on my LAN, and it's "fine". Because it's not encrypted and because VNC is quite inefficient, I would never think to send it outside my LAN. It was a mistake to try when I did back in the early-mid 2000s. Even with a 20 megabit upload, I can't image it it would be "good".

(In fact, I considered seeing about getting a mini g4 to VNC into to run the v2ls and vtools admin tools, using classic mode, since it's way more convenient than having to go to one of my vinage Macs where they're set up.)

If I need to do admin stuff on it when I'm away, I just RDP into my Windows box and then open a VNC client and that's "fine" - not really great because my upload dropped for unrelated reasons, but it does work. You could use a newer Mac to do this kind of relay, if you're more in on the ecosystem than me.

In general I haven't kept up with where Apple's own VNC/ARD implementation has gone and I also am not up on where VNC has gone in modern times. The low hanging fruit seems like it would be to use better compression on the signal and treat it as an h264 or h265 stream, but given the kinds of macs that run ~10.2-10.5 I don't know if that's necessarily viable, and the reason VNC was "usable" on a LAN in 2005 was that networking was good enough that sending not-well-compressed video but computing power wasn't really good enough to do a lot of compression on video.

At the time, RDP was way lower impact because what it did was (similar to X11) send instructions for drawing the screen rather than the entire screen picture, although RDP now mixes that with h264/h265 streaming in certian scenarios, which mostly has the impact of making video and gaming over it work.

I'm curious in general about the idea of replacing system bits, because an idea that was presented for new-vtools was to use something like tigerbrew or similar to set up and install newer versions of certain components for improved security on a vintage OS. I have yet to have a lot of time to look at that though.

If there's a lot of advantage to it, or if there are people who are using it this way and there's need for them to use 10.5 or older (as opposed to 10.6 even with rosetta) for some reason, then it's worth seeing if it's possible, can be integrated or can just run to the side of Apple's typical management/settings tools.

 

[adespoton]

I'm going to check the two using my 10.4 install and see if there's a noticeable difference.  My use case is similar to yours; TigerVNC 1.7.1 is the last version to support 10.4, so that's what I'll go with.  Most of the newer stuff is just to take advantage of faster hardware, although there's also some solid keyboard mapping/tracking and mouse improvements in later versions.

I'll post back in here with my results; one of the things I'm hoping is that TigerVNC will support a wider range of VNC clients.

 

[adespoton]

...so much for that.  Tiger builds appear to be x86 only.

 

[johnklos]

I'm going to check the two using my 10.4 install and see if there's a noticeable difference.  My use case is similar to yours; TigerVNC 1.7.1 is the last version to support 10.4, so that's what I'll go with.  Most of the newer stuff is just to take advantage of faster hardware, although there's also some solid keyboard mapping/tracking and mouse improvements in later versions.

I'll post back in here with my results; one of the things I'm hoping is that TigerVNC will support a wider range of VNC clients.

You think VNC would support more Mac stuff than built-in Screen Sharing?

 

[Cory5412]

What do you mean by Mac stuff in this case?

On my modern Macs (mostly 10.13/15 stuff) the screen sharing tool lets you transfer files and maps keyboard commands over and trackpad works pretty well, even with one of them on wireless. 10.13 controlling the 10.4 machine with built-in screen sharing is still a little better than VNCViewer on my Windows computer, but the main problem VNCviewer has with 10.4 is that right-click doesn't map correctly (it does on 10.13 though) so I have to ctrl-click if I need to get to a context menu.

W/re the existing TigerVNC for 10.4 - depending on what the source looks like, you might be able to build it yourself for PPC. I'm unmotivated to replace this one specific component mostly because it's not something I intend to make available for others. Depending on what the project itself did, that might be pretty low-effort. Depending on your dedication and skill/determination/time, you might be able to Cameron Kaiser it a little bit and build newer versions and see what's needed to make them work, if you want something newer than what's already there.

It kind of depends on if you want to and have the wherewithal and what you'll get out of it and what your expectations are for for what you're setting up. 

 

[johnklos]

I meant the built-in Mac stuff. I was curious if TigerVNC has features which go above and beyond what Apple already provides.

Every VNC I've tried has been fine for emergency use, but I wouldn't ever want to use it regularly.

 

[Cory5412]

Mmmm.... gotcha.

I'm pretty much in that same boat. 10.4's built-in VNC server incurs very little overhead on a CoreDuo Mac mini and is basically good enough to drive the thing from my modern computer. I wouldn't do this over the Internet, but it's meaningfully more convenient than setting up a physical KVM for a machine that stays running. Long term, I'll probably get another machine to run the admin tools on and, for my use case in particular, will only log directly into the machine in emergencies.

 

[adespoton]

Yeah; in my case, this is my "Classic application server" so I've got it dedicated to running VNC and AirFoil, so I can spin up old software on a modern system.

If it weren't for the slow data bus, I'd move my server back to my G4 Mini from my CoreDuo Mini as it's so much quieter and less memory intensive.  As it is, I run 10.6 on my CoreDuo, and it happily (albeit noisily) handles the NAS and other networking requirements.

 

[Cory5412]

Mmmm, yeah, that's gonna be kind of a limiting thing. I'm honestly not confident that even a newer VNC server will overcome the limits of a mini g4. As noted, VNC is not "efficient". It's working "so well" for me because I have everything in my house connected to a pair of reasonably nice gigabit ethernet switches, and everything involved has gigabit ethernet, and all my computers have a healthy excess of CPU horsepower. Switching to a VNC server that, say, has h.264 compression built in is going to be of no use on a mini g4, which won't reasonably be able to encode everything at any kind of resolution at any kind of high speed.

The early coreduo Mac mini I'm running is sort of a midrange 1.83 model and AppleVNCServer or whatever the process name is uses ~5-20% of the system resources, depending on what's all happening. It'll be a much higher percentage on a any PowerPC system. 

The next thing I'd say to try to make it better is turn down the color and resolution - basically as far as they'll go.

I'd be curious as to what this is like. On my coreduo mini and my sandy/ivy ones it's basically perfectly fine to drive them through their built-in VNC servers on my windows computers. Not perfect, but really not bad. You wouldn't enjoy multimedia with it but you can administer a server or write a paper and manage a spreadsheet through it.

 

[CC_333]

If it weren't for the slow data bus, I'd move my server back to my G4 Mini from my CoreDuo Mini as it's so much quieter and less memory intensive.  As it is, I run 10.6 on my CoreDuo, and it happily (albeit noisily) handles the NAS and other networking requirements.

The CoreDuo minis shouldn't be much noisier than G4 minis.  Have you checked the fan?  Cleaned/replaced the thermal paste?

Seems like maybe the fan might be dirty/broken.

However!  Right from new, our 2006 CoreDuo mini (currently in pieces; I really need to get it back together at some point) made a quiet grinding sound from the apparently defective-from-factory fan which made it fairly annoying to use after a few hours.  Finally, years later, I gathered up the nerve to open it and replaced the fan, and instantly it was much quieter.  Goes to show that some CoreDuo minis were indeed probably somewhat noisy, even from new, but still, as a rule, they shouldn't be.

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