Remote Desktop to Mac from Windows and Ubuntu

Normal VNC clients only support a password, not a username.

To allow for that to connect to your Mac, in System Preferences » Sharing, click button "Computer Settings" and enable "VNC viewers may control screen with password [..]".

As an aside: one can also use a Java viewer. I tested the "Binary *.class and JAR files" package from TightVNC.

To use it from the command line:

• java VncViewer HOST name_or_ip_of_your_mac

To use it from a browser: its index.html file is just an example. But even when that is fixed one cannot easily use a browser to connect to just any remote computer, as Java by default would only be allowed to connect to the host from which the applet was downloaded. But if you don't mind running both Screen Sharing and Web Sharing on the Mac that you want to access, then:

• In Terminal, to host the applet from a new folder "vnc":

  cd /Library/WebServer/Documents/
  sudo mkdir -m 777 vnc
  curl http://www.tightvnc.com/download/1.3.10/tightvnc-1.3.10_javabin.tar.gz | tar xzv -C vnc

• Edit vnc/index.html to add classes/ in ARCHIVE="classes/VncViewer.jar", and to change the port from 5901 to 5900. (Optionally also change the dimensions and other parameters. Setting "Open new window" to "true", and "Scaling factor" to "auto" seems nice, but note that the new window will close if the (unused) parent browser window is closed.)

• Enable both Screen Sharing and Web Sharing through System Preferences » Sharing (and check that above-mentioned "VNC viewers may control screen with password [..]" is set).

• Ensure ports 80 and 5900 are allowed in your firewall, and maybe even set up some port mapping in a router. Alternatively: things will be more secure when enabling SSH through Sharing » Remote Login, and use a tunnel to connect to the Mac. Like on Windows with PuTTY:

  putty.exe -ssh -L 8080:localhost:80 -L 5900:localhost:5900 user@name_or_ip_of_your_mac

• Simply browse to something like http://name_or_ip_of_your_mac/vnc (or, when using the tunnel: http://localhost:8080/vnc)

(Tested from a Mac running 10.6 with Java 6, towards a Mac running Screen Sharing on 10.5.x, and from WinXP to 10.6.x.)