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mummey
Asked: 2011-01-27 11:08:40 +0800 CST

Connect Remote Desktop Viewer to Mac on same local network with Screen Sharing enabled

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I have a Mac laptop (10.6) with screen sharing enabled. I would like to connect to it from my Ubuntu desktop running 10.04.

I have Remote Desktop Viewer installed. The laptop doesn't show up in the "nearby" list but I can see the machine in the list when I go to Machine->Connect and press Find in the resulting panel. Selecting the Mac results in a wait and then a pop up error panel stating: Avahi resolver failure: Timeout reached

So my question, is there an easy way to connect from Ubuntu to Mac? If not with Remote Desktop Viewer, then what is the "preferred" method?

vnc

1 Answers

  1. I'm fairly certain that Vinagre, the built in VNC viewer tool has excellent avahi (also known as mDNS or ZeroConf) support. Bonjour, which is Apple's version of Avahi is, from memory, reasonably compatible. I've used it both for iTunes library sharing from Mac to Ryhthmbox and VNC sharing - at least back in the days I still used Macs (about two years ago).

    However, just to rule out a bug in Vinagre, try the (I think) even better Remmina to see if it can connect :

    sudo apt-get install remmina remmina-gnome

    You can also see what's being broadcast on your network with avahi-utils. You can install it with

    sudo apt-get install avahi-utils

    Then see what's running on your network with 

    avahi-browse -a

    I should also add that Avahi just advertises the conneciton. You'll still need to know the password to connect - that's set in the Mac settings. From this older blog post :

    Mac VNC Settings

    And you don't need to use Avahi at all if you already know the IP address of the Mac itself. Just stick it into a new connection profile on either Vinagre or Remmina and you'll be able to specify the password and connect that way. As I say, Avahi just advertises the service across your local network.

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