zigg/journal

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Sharing the wife's new iMac

For Valentine's Day, I surprised my wife with one of the latest iMac models; specifically, the 20" 2.4GHz. I'm parked in front of it right now, typing this post... and I must say, I'm getting rather enamored with it. We're not new to Mac in this house; this iMac replaces her aging iMac DV+, which we were running OS X 10.3.9 on (and rather well, I might add)—it wasn't a horrible performer by any stretch of the imagination, but it was beginning to show its limitations and it was cursed by horribly unreliable USB support.

While I always sort of liked the old iMac, I am really taken with this one. It doesn't hurt that it's by far the most powerful computer in the house, but 10.5 (I always forget the cat names) is really a wonderfully engineered operating system. It's getting to the point that I'm finding myself wondering if, when it's time to replace the old Presario R3000, I might consider going Mac instead of wrestling with Linux support on a new piece of hardware until all the kinks are ironed out. I do wonder if I'll find myself running up against Apple walls, though. I like that I can go anywhere in my system and, if I care to, can dig right on down to the source code for pretty much everything.

So now that we have this machine of wonder in the house, which of course I have to let my wife use in the evenings since it is technically her computer and all, I got to wondering—is there any way we can share it? I know OS X doesn't run on X11, so I can't ssh -X OS X apps across to my wimpy little laptop, but as it turns out, there is actually a way to let multiple people simultaneously use the same Mac. I found out about it through some Googling, and it's really quite simple:
  1. Download Vine Server (a.k.a. OSXvnc).
  2. Turn on "Fast User Switching" at System Preferences > Accounts > Login Options. (This is a good idea anyway!)
  3. Log yourself in, start Vine Server up, and use the user switch menu in the upper-right corner of the screen to go back to the login window.
  4. Connect via your favorite VNC viewer.
I thought it was going to be markedly more difficult, but it works great. I can even change resolutions inside my own session, and it doesn't do a thing to whoever's using the machine proper. Our venerable ScanJet isn't a fan of Fast User Switching—it pops errors when the second person logs in—but other than that it's as transparent as can be.

I guess there's something to that whole Mac "just works" thing. I wonder if I might be the next full-fledged OS X convert down the road...

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posted by zigg 6:27 PM

2 Comments:

Yo Matt, MJM here. I'm sure you know which one!

Chicken of the VNC is meant to be the be-all and end-all for Mac VNC viewers. Give that a go if you aren't already for step 4.

Enjoy it!

Anonymous Anonymous February 19, 2009 11:42 PM  

Hey MJM. Yes, I know you. :D

We already had Chicken on there, as a matter of fact; my wife had it on her nearly-9-year-old iMac and it magically transmuted over via the FireWire migration when she set her new toy up. I used it to test the setup when I was first experimenting, actually.

But once it was all set up, I needed a non-Mac VNC viewer to actually view the thing! :) Ubuntu's Terminal Services Client called out to the standard Linux VNC viewer and all was well there.

Actually, I do want to take a look at a potentially better VNC viewer, though, on the Linux side. Unix VNC viewers have never had scaling ability; TightVNC added it but only for Windows. It seems like there just might be that feature in a new, enhanced viewer called ssvnc. Works for OS X and Windows, too; I will have to give that a spin.

Blogger zigg February 20, 2009 7:28 AM  

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