Installing Aaron's VNC Viewer for Maemo - an Installation Tutorial???

[dclawyer]

What a great application Aaron has developed. Just one little problem for this non-non-non-techie -- can someone give a step-by-step on installing the application, and getting it to work??? For example, what does one do after clicking on the link to the application (and does one click on the link from his/her 770 or his her PC???)? Does any special software need to be installed before this application will work?

Basically, I am asking for someone's courtesy in furnishing a step-by-step here because nothing I've tried, intuitively, is working for me in getting this application installed. That scratching sound you are hearing is me scrathing my head, over and over and over. And I really want to get this application up and running on my 770 -- it sounds great!

Many thanks to all who take the time to reply. Happy New Year to all!

P.S. To any and all who respond, please feel free to be as simplistic and detailed as you want. By all means, assume I know nothing here --because apparently I don't. Otherwise, I wouldn't be reaching out for your kind assistance.

[AaronL]

What a great application Aaron has developed. Just one little problem for this non-non-non-techie -- can someone give a step-by-step on installing the application, and getting it to work??? For example, what does one do after clicking on the link to the application (and does one click on the link from his/her 770 or his her PC???)? Does any special software need to be installed before this application will work?

Basically, I am asking for someone's courtesy in furnishing a step-by-step here because nothing I've tried, intuitively, is working for me in getting this application installed. That scratching sound you are hearing is me scrathing my head, over and over and over. And I really want to get this application up and running on my 770 -- it sounds great!

Many thanks to all who take the time to reply. Happy New Year to all!

P.S. To any and all who respond, please feel free to be as simplistic and detailed as you want. By all means, assume I know nothing here --because apparently I don't. Otherwise, I wouldn't be reaching out for your kind assistance.
Use the Web browser on the 770 to open a page that links to the 0.1.1 version of the file. For instance, you can navigate to the post I wrote on the main thread announcing the 0.1.1 release. Click on the link on the Web page. It will automatically download the .deb file to your 770, assuming that you have a connection to the Internet. When it downloads, it will automatically ask you if you want to install--you'll figure out the rest :-)

Aaron

[RogerS]

I know that the gray area for me when I was doing this -- the part I didn't know what I was doing or if I was intuiting the right thing to do -- wasn't involved with installing Aaron's VNC viewer, but the other end of the connection, dealing with the PC I wanted to view (control?).

Because of a side reference I went to the RealVNC (http://realvnc.com) site and downloaded a zip file that included "server" and "client" for a PC, ignored the client part, and installed the "server," which really just is the software that runs on the other machine. Part of the installation included an opportunity in the Authentication tab of the Options dialog to configure a password for the VNC Password Authentication. After the installation, I launched the program.

I couldn't really figure out the explanations of how to connect the two together pieces together, the "server" on the PC and the Viewer on the 770, but when I looked at the icons in the Viewer toolbar, the leftmost vaguely looked like two cables connected. So I clicked on that and the VNC Viewer Connection Details dialog popped up with a text box to be filled in and labeled "VNC server".

On the PC, the VNC server had put an icon in the taskbar and putting my mouse over it gave an IP address. I didn't know what else to do so I entered that address, and that seemed to be the right thing because I was then presented with a dialog box asking for a user name (I left it blank) and authentication password, the one that I had just set up in the server. And when I entered that, the 770 was able to remotely control the PC.

The whole thing, including Googling VNC, wandering around the RealVNC site looking for info, and doing all the above took about 10 minutes.

[dclawyer]

Thank you Aaron and Roger. I'm good now, basically having done what Roger said he did. Very good application. One question though: does the PC have to be "on" at all times in order to access it remotely via the 770? I ask this because when my PC was in "standby" mode, Aaron's VNC via the 770 showed just a blank desktop, and I couldn't get it to do anything. If such is the case, what is the workaround for those times I'm away at work, travelling, etc., for hours, days, etc., and want to be able to remotely access my PC???? Thanks again.

[AaronL]

Thank you Aaron and Roger. I'm good now, basically having done what Roger said he did. Very good application. One question though: does the PC have to be "on" at all times in order to access it remotely via the 770? I ask this because when my PC was in "standby" mode, Aaron's VNC via the 770 showed just a blank desktop, and I couldn't get it to do anything. If such is the case, what is the workaround for those times I'm away at work, travelling, etc., for hours, days, etc., and want to be able to remotely access my PC???? Thanks again.
I'm surprised that it is able to "connect" at all when the PC is in standby mode. Did you try moving the mouse pointer around?

When the system is in standby, one of the other sleep states, or simply turned off (hibernate or shutdown), you could make the PC automatically turn on if it receives network activity. This option is generally available from the properties dialog for your network card driver (please note that I am talking about Windows here, not other operating systems). I will assume that you can determine how to get to Device Manager, and from there to view the properties for the device of interest. If the device supports power management, usually, there is a "Power Management" tab on the "Properties" dialog. You would want to check the box that says "Allow this device to bring the computer out of standby". However, checking this box may cause the computer to turn on as a result of unwanted network activity. To prevent this, you could also check the "Only allow management stations to bring the computer out of standby". This means that the computer will turn on, assuming that support is also enabled in the BIOS and hardware, when a special Wake-on-LAN (WOL) magic packet is sent to it. In order to send a magic packet to a computer, you will need to know it's MAC address and have a special utility that will create and send a magic packet to it, something that isn't so simple (perhaps not possible? I'm not sure) if you aren't on the same subnet. I'm not aware of any utilities that have been ported to the 770, but it should be a simple matter to build the command-line wol tool (at http://ahh.sourceforge.net/wol/) for the 770, which requires that xterm also be available.

Please note that the above information has nothing to do with VNC.

Aaron

[happymeal20]

i'm having a problem i guess on the server end. i use bellsouth DSL, and when i type in the ip address to the 770 it does nothing for about 3 minutes then says it cannot connect. any possible ideas? i downloaded and installed realvnc on my PC and it seems to be working oh k, except the whole not connecting thing.
any help would be awesome.

[augur]

disclaimer - i have not tried this but i have researched it, mainly because my pc is on 24/7, although i do have a magic packet app installed to wake a pc in another room
web based wake on lan (wol) packet creater
www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/woli.aspx

nb not all network cards can understand the magic packet, afaik only intel or 3com cards are able too.
assuming you have broadband and a router
you need to open a port in your router and/or firewall
if your router only allows you to forward a port to a single ip you will need to make the target pc have a static ip.

for the web wol interface to work you need
target pc mac address
ip address of you routers web interface
the port number you opened in the router
your networks subnet mask (probably 255.255.255.0)

[AaronL]

i'm having a problem i guess on the server end. i use bellsouth DSL, and when i type in the ip address to the 770 it does nothing for about 3 minutes then says it cannot connect. any possible ideas? i downloaded and installed realvnc on my PC and it seems to be working oh k, except the whole not connecting thing.
any help would be awesome.
I encountered this problem just a bit ago. I had neglected to include the display number as in <hostname>:<display number>. The display number typically isn't needed when the VNC server is running on a Windows system, but it is needed when running on a Linux system. It probably should not take 3 minutes to report that it cannot connect, but this is likely the reason why it didn't work for you.

Aaron