Mac

How to Fast VNC alternativ to Remote Desktop to a Mac using NoMachine

March 24, 2010 in Computer, Mac, Network, Software, Unix

I am a very happy Mac OS user with a Mac mini and a MacBook Pro coming soon, but one things I really miss about Mac OS X is the lack of a fast and standards based remote desktop solution. The VNC server built into Mac OS X isn’t really compatible with all clients, and I still haven’t figured out if it’s possible to run it with a different resolution and color depth than the real screen!!!

But, I recently re-discovered a solution I got to know in my Linux time on a desktop: NoMachine. You’ll need a server running a recent Linux distribution or OpenSolaris which will act as a kind of a proxy and the setup is a bit complex, but it does work well. I’ll show you how to do it running Ubuntu Lucid.

First go to http://www.nomachine.com/select-package.php?os=linux&id=1 select your architecture and download all three files: client, node and server.

Then install them in the following order, fix the missing dependecies and install a vnclient plus vncpassword:

sudo dpkg -i nxclient_3.4.0-7_x86_64.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxnode_3.4.0-11_x86_64.deb
sudo dpkg -i nxserver_3.4.0-12_x86_64.deb
sudo aptitude -f install
sudo aptitude install xvnc4viewer vnc4-common

Since it’s really advisable I hope you already have PasswordAuthentication no in your sshd_config to disable Password authentication and to only allow key-based authentication. You’ll need to tweak nxserver a bit to get it working with key-based auth. Edit /usr/NX/etc/server.cfg to…

EnablePasswordDB = "1"

…edit the following line in /usr/NX/etc/node.cfg to enable VNC…

CommandStartRFB = "/usr/bin/vncviewer -fullscreen"

…create a key for your key-based authentication and restart nxserver.

sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --keygen
sudo service nxserver restart

Your new key is placed at /usr/NX/share/keys/default.id_dsa.key. Copy it the device you want to connect from using scp or similar tools. Now all you need to do is enable the users you wan’t in nxserver:

sudo /usr/NX/bin/nxserver --useradd <user>

This enables the user in NX’s database and copies the previously generated key to the user’s authorized_keys file.

Now just enable VNC on your Mac. Go to “System Preferences”, select “Sharing” and enable “Screen Sharing”:

Now you’ll need to configure your client. Read more…

How to Use Google Apps as a MobileMe or Exchange alternative

November 3, 2009 in Computer, How-To, Network, Software

I already wrote about Google Apps as a mail-hoster for your own domains. Today I’m going to talk about Google Apps for almost everything else you might need for your office or personal organization. I just set up Google Calendar and Google Address book synchronization on my Google Apps account.

Your Gmail account also has the Calendar, Contacts, Sites and Docs features, but you can’t collaborate with other employees or members that good. On the other hand you have many other features like Reader or Picasaweb within one account.

I used to use Funambol for contact synchronization, but with my iPhone or my Mac or anything else but Thunderbird synchronization was very beta like and crashed my Contact database several times. Plus they went commercial a few weeks ago. My self-hosted Calendar also didn’t sync very well with my computers and mobile devices which is why I was looking for a more reliable solution.

And although I don’t really like the Idea of storing personal information like Contacts and Calendars at the servers of a company like Google, the way better synchronization compared to my previous and the other (free) solutions I tried, made me switch to Google Apps for these two tasks. And I really like it!

Google Apps provides Microsoft Exchange and CalDAV functionality, so you can sync your contacts and calendars to almost every client and device you want. Read more…

How to Encode Videos for iPhone or iPod on any Unix using ffmpeg

November 20, 2008 in Computer, How-To, Mobile, Software, Unix

Imagine what? I’m a big fan of the iPhone/iPod touch for mobile entertainment and since I’m also a big fan of the commandline, I of course want to use ffmpeg for video conversion.
But… I’ve been looking for a working ffmpeg config for serveral months now. There were issues with Medibuntu’s version of ffmpeg for Ubuntu Hardy (or at least I had a lot of issues), there were issues with iTunes’ crazy restrictions, there are dozens of (non) working ffmpeg configs on the web… so I just want to share my config with you. Read more…