Today I wanted to take a look at AMIVNC4 on my AmigaOne X1000.

AmiVNC is an AmigaOS4 port of the popular VNC Server software which allows you to view what is happening on the desktop of a computer from a different computer.

It is available to download from www.onyxsoft.se, under the Utilities heading:

I downloaded it and extracted it to System:Utilities

Reading the release notes that come with it, I found there is a workbench icon for AmiVNC but most of it's functionality exists in the command line version of the program. So I will focus on this.

First I ran amivnc4 -h from the Shell to see the available options. There are quite a few:

First things first - let's set a password to ensure a secure session - for testing purposes let's use 'secret':

This now saves the password and exits the program. It is not needed to enter this parameter again unless you want to change the password.

Next, let's setup AmiVNC verbose mode (-v) so we can see what is happening and specify -s5902 to specify to accept VNC connections on port 5902:

So now AmiVNC is waiting for a connection...

At this point let's switch across to my Windows 7 Pro PC. Initially I tried to use TightVNC client to connect to the AmigaOne X1000:

I didn't change any default settings, and when I click connect I am prompted for the password:

After entering the password and clicking OK, I was greeted with the AmigaOne X1000 desktop on my PC - however there was a big problem with the colours:

So next I consulted Google and found a lot of people hit the same problem using TightVNC and other variants of the VNC client. (Even after adjusting RGB settings, etc)

The author of the AmigaOS4 port provided a link to the VNC Client he used to successfully connect to the AmiVNC4 server. This link is at http://s.guillard.free.fr/OS4/vncviewer.zip

Once I downloaded and extracted this older VNC client for Windows, I was ready to try again:

Once again I was prompted for the password:

After this I was greeted with the AmigaOne X1000 desktop on my Windows 7 PC, all colours correct! (Click to expand):

Below is the VNC client on the PC multitasking nicely with Office 2013 which I freshly installed this weekend on the PC to play around with (click to expand):

The screen update is not that fast from the X1000, but it is usable for common tasks. I wouldn't expect to play games remotely or anything like that!

Great result - I can now VNC to the X1000!

On the AmigaOne X1000, you can see the connection information from the verbose output of the program:

Next, of course I wanted to make AmiVNC4 run on boot so that I can connect to the X1000 anytime I want to from my PC without running the program from the Shell everytime. To do this I added some lines to the bottom of the System:s/user-startup file.

The relevant lines are highlighted while editing the file below in Notepad (Click to expand):

After a reboot I tested connecting from the PC and it worked! Excellent!

I hope this information is useful to anyone trying to get AmiVNC4 working on their X1000!