Mac Forum / Country Specific / Australian Mac Group / September 2007

I don't know just how relevant this is to most people, but at the moment
I am running two pretty good computers - a MacPro and a MacMini. The
latter has been my workhorse for 1-2 years, and it has all my programs
and many files on it. The MacPro I use for the jobs that need lots of
computing power and I didn't want to clutter it up with everything
that's on the MacMini, so I run them both simultaneously. That's fine,
but it meant having two separate keyboards and mice taking up valuable
desk real estate, and the tedium of switching from one keyboard to the
other.

Then I discovered JollyFastVNC as the result of a MacOSX hint

(see
http://feeds.macosxhints.com/~r/macosxhints/recent/~3/152528843/article.
php )

available at

http://www.jinx.de/JollysFastVNC.html

What this does for me (and if I can set it up then anyone can!) is to
give me full remote GUI control over the MacMini from the screen for the
MacPro, meaning that I can operate the MacMini from the same keyboard
and mouse as the MacPro, with very little diminution in speed. It's
amazing (and free!)

With the two networked together via the router, I can open all the bitty
programs I need (email, browser, newsreaders, word-processor etc) on the
MacMini, and it comes up in a window on the MacPro screen that is
totally integrated with that of the MacPro; but just one keyboard and
mouse is required for both - very much like running XP via Parallels on
one or the other computers. It doesn't take much of the RAM of the
MacPro to run, and gives me access to the computing power of the MacMini
right there on the one screen; in fact, I can simply plug in the screen
I usually use with the MacMini to the MacPro and use it in dual screen
mode if I like, only the resolution on the second screen isn't quite as
good in this case. Just one keyboard and mouse is nice!

If you have a number of networked computers then you might appreciate
this as well, rather than jumping up from one computer to the other.  I
don't know if the existence of this program is well known, but I only
just discovered it, and it is so fast compared with anything else that I
find it simply amazing.  I thought I'd share it with you.

Rifty