Or, you might use it to see what a friend is doing and help them solve a problem they are facing.Ī lot of people also use remote desktop software for themselves. Wrapping It Up: What Is The Best Free Teamviewer Alternative?įor example, your IT team might use it to provide support to customers.The 12 Best Free Teamviewer Alternatives.This is honestly what I would recommend - just give the mac it's own monitor. I use synergy to share one keyboard/mouse between the PC/Mac. I finally broke down and just bought an inexpensive 24' 1080p HDMI monitor for the mac & a vertical monitor stand so it didn't take up any more desktop space. None of those solutions would let you log in from a reboot though, so it still made it impossible to run headless. I also tried using splashtop for awhile - it actually handled the animations and other stuff in lion the best, but at the expensive of very high cpu usage. There's a 4.0 version of VINE which also works as a more PC compatible VNC server. I used a trial of RealVNC Enterprise as a Lion VNC server (since screen sharing was terrible when connecting from a PC), and it performed acceptably - but I wasn't going to pay for it. Performance (over a 1Gig Ethernet connection) was also pretty terrible, bordering on unusable (much, much, much worse than snow lion).

I did have some luck getting RealVNC, TightVNC, and UltraVNC all to connect to screen sharing *after* I had logged in to the local console, but this made running headless awkward at best.

The problem seems to be the user login screen - Apple changed how it interacts with screen sharing - so you will not be able to VNC into the mac after a reboot - without logging first at the local console. So I played that game to after picking up a new mac mini (from an old SL iMac). Doesn't really matter, they all work fine.

Just turn on screen sharing and use TightVNC, RealVNC, UltraVNC, etc. Edit: Reading OP fail - just caught you were still on 10.5.8 - everything below applies to lion, but before that just about any windows VNC client works fine.

Ultravnc viewer mac