blindvnc.

what

blindvnc is a stripped down version of the TightVNC vncviewer. It gives you a blank window in which you can move your mouse and hit keys, and nothing else.

why?

I have an old MacBook hooked up to my TV. When I need a graphical interface on it, I'm likely looking at it on TV. Most things I do are done via a web interface or SSH. I can control VLC and Transmission from there, etc.

I also have a ThinkPad T61 with a stupid wireless card built in that FreeBSD supports in a rather novel way: I can actually observe corrupt packets coming from the card! That's so coax, man. Needless to say, this is a lousy interface to run VNC over. Most of the time vncviewer gives up and I can move the cursor on my ThinkPad and see what happens on my TV, but often my connectivity is disrupted for a while first by futile attempts at updating the screen.

So I started ripping out all of the display update code, and then everything else I didn't need. Among other things, it now takes a password on the command line, so good luck hiding your password from other users on your system. Needless to say, this isn't a concern on my laptop. Plus, the VNC password for my TV MacBook is "password". It's just there because the no-password authentication didn't work right, and I can't be bothered trying to fix it.

get.

You can download blindvnc's source code: blindvnc-1.0.tar.gz. It uses a couple of X libraries and the Makefile is a simple FreeBSD one. If you can't figure out how to make this build on your system and you have the right libraries installed, this probably isn't the program you actually want.


Copyright © 2009 Juli Mallett. All rights reserved.