I asked a similar question here before but apparently I wasn't as clear as I had expected by the responses. That said, I'll try again.
I have a Mac Pro with quad monitors which I would like to access remotely. I've been using VNC for this (either via screen sharing or a dedicated VNC client), which works, but the VNC protocol matches the physical layout/resolutions of attached monitors and not those of the client like RDP does.
One of the things I like about Microsoft's Remote Desktop (Terminal Server) client is that when you connect, it blanks out the local screens and sets the resolution to a client-specified setting. In other words, even though on my host machine I'm running a quad-monitor setup (30" monitor flanked by 2 24" monitors as well as a 21" Cintiq), when I access it from my notebook (client), the desktop (host) reconfigures itself to perfectly match the resolution of the client. This is not scaling or cropping. If you look at the arrangement of the monitors in Control Panel, you'll now see it show a single monitor matching the notebook as if the four physical monitors don't exist.
That's also how RDP gets such great throughput because its working as an optimized remote video driver and not trying to 'screen scrape' the screen of an actual video card like VNC does.
Again, VNC works and yes I know I can use 5901, 5902…n to attach VNC to a specific monitor as opposed to the entire desktop, but I'm still at the mercy of trying to look at a 2560×1600 resolution on a 1280×800 screen. I'm left with either scaling (everything's too small) or panning/scrolling (it's like playing hide-and-seek with your documents!)
SO… anyone know of any Mac-based remote software (client and server) that will let me connect to my Mac Pro and reset the resolution by the client, just like you can in Windows, or am I SOL?
Best Answer
An entirely different approach, depending on what software you need to run, would be to fire windows back to yourself using X over ssh. This, of course, will only be workable if you are actually running XWindow applications rather than native Cocoa apps under Aqua. :)