MacOS – Looking for VNC client solutions that work reliably on a Mac running OS X 10.9.5

macosremote desktopscreen-sharingsoftware-recommendation

I have a number of FreeBSD servers, and I'd like to put VNC server software on them, then access them from a Mac running OS X 10.9.5.

I really don't want to have to access them from a virtual windows machine running on the MAC 🙁

A web search for "mac vnc client" produces zero useful hits. (I don't want remote access to the mac.)

My memory is that Apple had a built in client with a non-obvious name, perhaps "screen", which they "fixed" a few releases ago to only work if the VNC server was itself from Apple, running on a Mac. Perhaps they have since unfixed it.

I once used "chicken of the vnc", which was flaky on whatever OS X release I had 2 years ago. I also used another non-apple client from that Mac, which was flaky in different ways. (The built in app was unusable.)

IIRC, I was using "Tightvnc" or "Realvnc" on my servers at that time, which had worked fine with the first random windows-based VNC client I tried.

All I've heard about so far are

  • "screen sharing app" from apple, possibly pre-installed on the mac,
    name and location unknown
  • a client from realvnc that runs in the chrome browser (ugh!)

When referring to OS X releases, please use release numbers in your answers, not just names of cats – or else link to a page that translates the cat names to release numbers. I don't have Apple's release code names memorized.

[Update, after first answer received: alternativeto.net is a great source for finding software of this type. I now have tigervnc running on one server and on the Mac client. No flakiness so far, but the Mac client for tigervnc seems unwilling to let me connect to multiple servers at the same time, and Mac's GUI interface seems unwilling to let me launch multiple copies of the client program. So still looking for alternatives, but making progress.

Still trying to figure out how to invoke the client built into OSX – it's not at the path I found on the net, /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications Looks like I need to know the right invocation to feed to Finder, which doesn't have anything like a button labelled 'screen sharing'. I did find a menu item labelled "connect to server", but that just gives me connection failures, perhaps because it's defaulting a URI type of afp:// which probably has nothing to do with vnc – or perhaps because the tool is unrelated to vnc.]

Best Answer

The built-in VNC client with OS X works just great with most VNC servers I've tried on FreeBSD. I've mostly been using TigerVNC from ports (seems to be the fastest with OS X's VNC client), and the only issue I have is when I restart the VNC server while connected to it. The OS X VNC client will reconnect (great!) but it sizes the window oddly, and I can't resize it. Since scaling is turned on, this usually results in a small screen that cannot be read. Just restart the VNC client (or close the window and open a new connection, if you've got multiple connections open), and it's all OK again.

Since I have xterms open all the time on my mac, I generally do it like so:

open vnc://<host>:<port>

where <port> is the TCP port on which the server is running.

E.g. if it's :1, you'd use 5901 as <port>. You can even install the avahi port, and set up a service, so the VNC session shows up in Finder (although there's a Finder preference to change to make them show up since OS X 10.8, IIRC), just like a Mac that has "screen sharing" enabled (i.e. it's running a VNC server).

Related Question