eftychia: Me in poufy shirt, kilt, and Darth Vader mask, playing a bouzouki (vader)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 07:16pm on 2010-10-15

So my mother has this shiny, new iMac, and I've got a Powerbook G4. She's got twice as much RAM, a faster CPU with multiple cores, and more disk space than she's going to fill up for a little while. Since I'm hanging out at her house, I'd like to borrow some of that power to speed up some CPU+RAM-intensive tasks.

If I were trying to use an X app, I'd know just what to do -- running an X application remotely is a standard maneuver under X (and one of the niftier aspects of X). But I haven't worked out how to do this with a native Mac OS app that doesn't use the X server. I can use VNC to take control of Mom's entire screen, but that's (a) overkill and (b) a bit annoying, what with the lag in screen updates and radically different screen sizes (and even more annoying if she's trying to use her computer at the time!). I can put off these things until I'm sitting in front of her computer, but when I'm not feeling well, it'd be nice to be able to run things from my Powerbook, in bed.

So ... how do I launch a native Mac OS application with its screen/keyboard/mouse I/O redirected to a different Mac, like I routinely do under X? I'm not the only one who thinks this is an obvious thing to want to do, am I?

There are 3 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
jayblanc: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] jayblanc at 11:47pm on 2010-10-15
Unfortunately, you can't. The OS X GUI was never built as a network-server like X11, so you can't just remote launch an OS X app on a different computer.

You *can* run X11 apps from the mac that way. But native OS X UI apps, no, you can only access them via screen share or VNC.
eftychia: Me in poufy shirt, kilt, and Darth Vader mask, playing a bouzouki (vader)
posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 12:03am on 2010-10-16
*pout*

But it's so useful, if there's more than one computer in the house! *sigh* (Even being able to create a virtual screen for a VNC server not attached to the hardware display would be useful.)

Okay, I guess it's time to see which of the apps I want to use have Linux/X versions as well, and how much yak-shaving is involved in getting such a version to compile and install under Mac OS w/o autoconfig replacing the X calls with Mac-native calls if I look away.

GIMP would be easy, since that's an X app regardless, but for the most part it's other tools, like a panorama stitcher, that eat enough CPU to want running on the faster machine, and I installed "ready to just drag to the Applications folder", Mac-native versions of those.

Ah, I see Hugin has a Linux version ... let's see how simple or complicated this turns out to be ...
geekosaur: Mac OS X Snow Leopard retail packaging (mac os x)
posted by [personal profile] geekosaur at 01:04am on 2010-10-18
There's no way staying within Aqua. Even Apple's own products for this are based on VNC.

And, well, it's obvious to us, but the OpenSSH folks claim that a vanishingly small number of installations turn on its X11 forwarding, so apparently it's not actually all that common.

As to porting X11 stuff: get thee MacPorts, and install to thy heart's content.

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