Welcome to Ozzieburn

Ozzieburn | Montly Tips

Screen Sharing - Jul 2010

There is a sweet built in feature of OS X that a lot of people don't know about.  It is screen sharing.  You might also hear it refered to as VNC.  You can share a screen in Jaguar, Tiger and Leopard.  They each have a slightly different way to set it up, but luckily I think that with each version of the OS, it got easier to do.  You will need Leopard in order to have the built-in functionality of being able to access a remote computer though.  Because Leopard is the one that has both sides built-in, and it is newer than the others, this is the one I am going to cover here.

First, to set up your computer to be able to share the screen, go into the System Preferences, and click on the sharing pane.  To enable screen sharing, click the checkbox for screen sharing in the list.  You can change the settings for it by clicking on the computer settings button.  It is completely up to you how you want to have the settings set, but I would highly recommend for you to set a password to control the screen.  While you are in this screen, take note of the address specified, because this is what you have to use to connect to this machine remotely.

Now for connecting to another machine.  This is even easier, if you can believe it!  Either press the apple + k keys to bring up the "connect to" box, or go to the "go" menu and click on "connect to server".  Once this box is up all you have to do is type in the address of the computer you want to connect to.  The little catch here is that you have to specify the protocol you want to use, which is going to be vnc, so an example would be something like this:

vnc://192.168.0.241

Note:  the address you are going to enter here is going to be whatever is specified in the screen sharing preference pane on the computer when you set that up, or the IP address of the computer.

( Return to Main )