Using VNC on Mac OS X

Setup

Download and install a secure shell client

As you may have heard, the Mac OS X operating system is built off of a version of Unix, FreeBSD. You'll be happy to hear that this means you already have a secure shell client installed, the Unix native ssh. You will find it from the Terminal - more on that later.

Download and install a VNC client

We recommend using Chicken (forked off the defunct Chicken of the VNC project), although other clients (try the official VNC site) should also work.

  1. Download Chicken from the Chicken website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/chicken/.
  2. To install Chicken, mount the disk image by double-clicking on the DMG file. Then drag the application to the Applications directory on your hard drive.

There are other VNC clients that can be found in the App Store as well.

Connecting

Forward a port over a secure connection

Here, we set up a secure connection for VNC to talk over.

  1. On the Mac you're sitting at, open up a terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal).
  2. Now, you will start a secure connection over which VNC will travel. Grace Hopper would type:
    ssh -L 5901:localhost:5995 grhopper@mote.cs.vassar.edu

Connect using your VNC client

  1. Start Chicken of the VNC on the Mac or if already running select Connection ⇒ New Connection to bring up the Connect dialog box
  2. Fill in the Connect dialog box as follows:
    • In the Host field enter “localhost”
    • In the Display field enter “ 1 ”
    • Leave the Password field blank
    • Leave the check boxes unchecked
    • Click the Connect button on the bottom of the diolog box
  3. You should now see a graphical Unix login screen. Log in as you would in the lab with your “username” and “password”
  4. To toggle between full-screen mode, type Ctrl-Command-Option-~.
  5. When you finish your Unix session, log out as you normally would, quit Chicken of the VNC, and exit your ssh session.

VNC help | User Info | CS Department

— Ben Stoutenburgh 2012/11/08 17:03