❗ The project currently is unmaintained and is looking for a new maintainer, please see https://github.com/LibVNC/x11vnc/issues/186 ❗

This is x11vnc with its development continued by LibVNC and the GitHub community. While 0.9.13 was the last release by the original author Karl Runge, 0.9.14 was the first community-based release here on GitHub.

This repo represents the x11vnc codebase that once resided in the LibVNCServer repo. It was split off LibVNCServer and moved here with https://github.com/LibVNC/libvncserver/commit/498d222976975f53dea885cfe43ef0f805abd412.

x11vnc: a VNC server for real X displays

x11vnc allows one to view remotely and interact with real X displays (i.e. a display corresponding to a physical monitor, keyboard, and mouse) with any VNC viewer. In this way it plays the role for Unix/X11 that WinVNC plays for Windows.

It has built-in SSL/TLS encryption and 2048 bit RSA authentication, including VeNCrypt support; UNIX account and password login support; server-side scaling; single port HTTPS/HTTP+VNC; Zeroconf service advertising; and TightVNC and UltraVNC file-transfer. It has also been extended to work with non-X devices: natively on Mac OS X Aqua/Quartz, webcams and TV tuner capture devices, and embedded Linux systems such as Qtopia Core. Full IPv6 support is provided. More features are described here.

It also provides an encrypted Terminal Services mode (-create, -svc, or -xdmsvc options) based on Unix usernames and Unix passwords where the user does not need to memorize his VNC display/port number. Normally a virtual X session (Xvfb) is created for each user, but it also works with X sessions on physical hardware. See the tsvnc terminal services mode of the SSVNC viewer for one way to take advantage of this mode.

I wrote x11vnc back in 2002 because x0rfbserver was basically impossible to build on Solaris and had poor performance. The primary x0rfbserver build problems centered around esoteric C++ toolkits. x11vnc is written in plain C and needs only standard libraries and so should work on nearly all Unixes, even very old ones. I also created enhancements to improve the interactive response, added many features, and etc.

This page including the FAQ contains much information [*]; solutions to many problems; and interesting applications, but nevertheless please feel free to contact me if you have problems or questions (and if I save you time or expense by giving you some of my time, please consider a PayPal Donation.) Do check the FAQ and this page first; I realize the pages are massive, but you can often use your browser's find-in-page search action using a keyword to find the answer to your problem or question.

SSVNC: An x11vnc side-project provides an Enhanced TightVNC Viewer package (SSVNC) for Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X with automatic SSL and/or SSH tunnelling support, SSL Certificate creation, Saved connection profiles, Zeroconf, VeNCrypt, and built-in Proxy support. Added features for the TightVNC Unix viewer: NewFBSize, ZRLE encoding, Viewer-side Scaling, cursor alphablending, low color modes, and enhanced popup menu; UltraVNC extensions support for: File Transfer, Text Chat, Single Window, Server Input, and 1/n Scaling extensions, and UltraVNC DSM encryption. The SSVNC bundle could be placed on, say, a USB memory stick for SSL/SSH VNC viewing from nearly any networked computer.

Announcements

Important: If you created any permanent SSL certificates (e.g. via "x11vnc -ssl SAVE ...") on a Debian or Ubuntu system from Sept. 2006 through May 2008, then those keys are likely extremely weak and can be easily cracked. The certificate files should be deleted and recreated on a non-Debian system or an updated one. See http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571 for details. The same applies to SSH keys (not used by x11vnc directly, but many people use SSH tunnels for VNC access.)

News

See NEWS

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

See FAQ.md

Background

VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a very useful network graphics protocol (applications running on one computer but displaying their windows on another) in the spirit of X, however, unlike X, the viewing-end is very simple and maintains no state. It is a remote framebuffer (RFB) protocol.

Some VNC links:

http://www.realvnc.com
http://www.tightvnc.com
http://www.ultravnc.com/
http://www.testplant.com/products/vine_server/OS_X

For Unix, the traditional VNC implementation includes a "virtual" X11 server Xvnc (usually launched via the vncserver command) that is not associated with a physical display, but provides a "fake" one X11 clients (xterm, firefox, etc.) can attach to. A remote user then connects to Xvnc via the VNC client vncviewer from anywhere on the network to view and interact with the whole virtual X11 desktop.

The VNC protocol is in most cases better suited for remote connections with low bandwidth and high latency than is the X11 protocol because it involves far fewer "roundtrips" (an exception is the cached pixmap data on the viewing-end provided by X.) Also, with no state maintained the viewing-end can crash, be rebooted, or relocated and the applications and desktop continue running. Not so with X11.

So the standard Xvnc/vncserver program is very useful, I use it for things like:

Desktop conferencing with other users (e.g. code reviews.)
Long running apps/tasks I want to be able to view from many places (e.g. from home and work.)
Motif, GNOME, and similar applications that would yield very poor performance over a high latency link.

However, sometimes one wants to connect to a real X11 display (i.e. one attached to a physical monitor, keyboard, and mouse: a Workstation or a SunRay session) from far away. Maybe you want to close down an application cleanly rather than using kill, or want to work a bit in an already running application, or would like to help a distant colleague solve a problem with their desktop, or would just like to work out on the deck for a while. This is where x11vnc is useful.

How to use x11vnc

In this basic example let's assume the remote machine with the X display you wish to view is "far-away.east:0" and the workstation you are presently working at is "sitting-here.west".

Step 0. Download x11vnc (see below) and have it available to run on far-away.east (on some linux distros it is as easy as "apt-get install x11vnc", "emerge x11vnc", etc.) Similarly, have a VNC viewer (e.g. vncviewer) ready to run on sitting-here.west. We recommend TightVNC Viewers (see also our SSVNC viewer.)

Step 1. By some means log in to far-away.east and get a command shell running there. You can use ssh, or even rlogin, telnet, or any other method to do this. We do this because the x11vnc process needs to be run on the same machine the X server process is running on (otherwise things would be extremely slow.)

Step 2. In that far-away.east shell (with command prompt "far-away>" in this example) run x11vnc directed at the far-away.east X session display:

far-away> x11vnc -display :0

You could have also set the environment variable DISPLAY=:0 instead of using "-display :0". This step attaches x11vnc to the far-away.east:0 X display (i.e. no viewer clients yet.)

Common Gotcha: To get X11 permissions right, you may also need to set the XAUTHORITY environment variable (or use the -auth option) to point to the correct MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE file (e.g. /home/joe/.Xauthority.) If x11vnc does not have the authority to connect to the display it exits immediately. More on how to fix this below.

If you suspect an X11 permissions problem do this simple test: while sitting at the physical X display open a terminal window (gnome-terminal, xterm, etc.) You should be able to run x11vnc successfully in that terminal without any need for command line options. If that works OK then you know X11 permissions are the only thing preventing it from working when you try to start x11vnc via a remote shell. Then fix this with the tips below.

Note as of Feb/2007 you can also try the -find option instead of "-display ..." and see if that finds your display and Xauthority. Note as of Dec/2009 the -findauth and "-auth guess" options may be helpful as well. (End of Common Gotcha)

When x11vnc starts up there will then be much chatter printed out (use "-q" to quiet it), until it finally says something like:

.
.
13/05/2004 14:59:54 Autoprobing selected port 5900
13/05/2004 14:59:54 screen setup finished.
13/05/2004 14:59:54
13/05/2004 14:59:54 The VNC desktop is far-away:0
PORT=5900

which means all is OK, and we are ready for the final step.

Step 3. At the place where you are sitting (sitting-here.west in this example) you now want to run a VNC viewer program. There are VNC viewers for Unix, Windows, MacOS, Java-enabled web browsers, and even for PDA's like the Palm Pilot and Cell Phones! You can use any of them to connect to x11vnc (see the above VNC links under "Background:" on how to obtain a viewer for your platform or see this FAQ. For Solaris, vncviewer is available in the Companion CD package SFWvnc.)

In this example we'll use the Unix vncviewer program on sitting-here by typing the following command in a second terminal window:

sitting-here> vncviewer far-away.east:0

That should pop up a viewer window on sitting-here.west showing and allowing interaction with the far-away.east:0 X11 desktop. Pretty nifty! When finished, exit the viewer: the remote x11vnc process will shutdown automatically (or you can use the -forever option to have it wait for additional viewer connections.)

Common Gotcha: Nowadays there will likely be a host-level firewall on the x11vnc side that is blocking remote access to the VNC port (e.g. 5900.) You will either have to open up that

X11vnc

Install / Use

README