Nekonomicon - Setting resolution and enabling GPU with VNC

guardian452
Donor
From Kentucky, United States
Who joined Aug. 21, 2007, 10:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 22, 2015, 12:03 p.m...

Is there a way to set a resolution for VNC users in OSX? Without a monitor plugged into the server (mac pro), it defaults to just 1280x1024. Also, is there a way to enable GPU acceleration even without a monitor connected? I thought the performance of the vnc viewer I downloaded was bad, but realized that even with the screen sharing built into osx it is simply not using an accelerated desktop unless an actual monitor is plugged in. Performance seems much better with a monitor plugged into the server, even tho in "about this mac" it still shows the graphic card present (FWIW a radeon 5770)

A program like switchresx kinda takes care of the first part, just trying it out now

tho it seems ridiculous to have to pay for such basic functionality that should be part of the system... and it doesn't enable the GPU. (tho, if the power savings are significant, maybe I am better off with the GPU disabled as that sucker puts out a lot of heat!)

I have seen the dummy display dongles... no thanks, lol.

Google: Don't Be Evil. Apple: Don't Be Greedy. Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.

hamei
From over the rainbow
Who joined Feb. 24, 2004, 4:10 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 22, 2015, 6:22 p.m...

Doesn't Mackletosh have X ? I thought it was yeeewnix !! ?

guardian452
Donor
From Kentucky, United States
Who joined Aug. 21, 2007, 10:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 22, 2015, 7:43 p.m...

As an optional download. I fire up X once every few weeks... in a window... only when I *really* have to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript wrote: Apple's Mac OS X operating system uses a central window server (created entirely by Apple) that caches window graphics as PDF, instead of storing and executing PostScript code. A graphics library called Quartz 2D provides PostScript-style imaging using the PDF rendering model (a subset, plus tweaks, of the PostScript model), but this is used by application frameworks—there is no PostScript present in the Mac OS X window server. Apple chose to use this model for a variety of reasons, including the avoidance of high Adobe-imposed licensing fees for DPS, and more efficient support of legacy Carbon and Classic code; QuickDraw-based applications use bitmapped drawing exclusively

Want to find a convenient place where I can squirrel this box away but still login. As much as I dislike Apple, I dislike the alternatives even more. Still a good handy box to keep around, it just keeps ticking and does several useful things very well.

Hell, maybe just get a mini-DP-to-hdmi cord and hook it up to the teevee.

Google: Don't Be Evil. Apple: Don't Be Greedy. Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.

hamei
From over the rainbow
Who joined Feb. 24, 2004, 4:10 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 23, 2015, 1:45 a.m...

guardian452 wrote: As an optional download. I fire up X once every few weeks... in a window... only when I *really* have to.

Okay le, sorry for the misdirection. It appears from the poorly-written crap at Wikipedia that Apple does not use X at all. All their blather about pdf rather than postscript is just misdirection. Display Postscript is not a windowing system. X is. NextStep apparently wrote wrappers and extensions for display postscript to use it as a windowing system as well as a display driver. SGI did not. I could not see how you could use PDF as a windowing system.

And apparently they don't. At least as far as I can tell from the crappy writeup, quartz is much more than display pdf. It is also the windowing system. The display pdf thingy is a distraction.

So no X

I didn't see anything similar to rdp, either.

That's what I get for following the 'OS X is Unix !' breadcrumb trail to the old witch'es house in the forest

guardian452
Donor
From Kentucky, United States
Who joined Aug. 21, 2007, 10:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 25, 2015, 9:49 a.m...

hamei wrote:

guardian452 wrote: As an optional download. I fire up X once every few weeks... in a window... only when I *really* have to.

Okay le, sorry for the misdirection. It appears from the poorly-written crap at Wikipedia that Apple does not use X at all.

You say that like it is a bad thing?? X is universally hated, why would I want to use it? VNC is lightweight and simple. It's little more than just a video stream. My issue is with getting the graphics card to work without a monitor plugged in. Without it, even just scrolling through a web page is a little choppy. I figured there would be a magical hidden switch that reveals itself when the option key was held down. Apple is fond of hiding features like that. Even more so than configuration files. :twisted:

RDP or something like it would be nice, but I don't think it exists on mac, either.

Google: Don't Be Evil. Apple: Don't Be Greedy. Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.

hamei
From over the rainbow
Who joined Feb. 24, 2004, 4:10 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 25, 2015, 6:14 p.m...

guardian452 wrote: You say that like it is a bad thing?? X is universally hated, why would I want to use it?

Because it works ?

VNC is lightweight and simple.

But doesn't work

It's little more than just a video stream. My issue is with getting the graphics card to work without a monitor plugged in. Without it, even just scrolling through a web page is a little choppy.

With X, this is not a problem. I used to do it all the time. The O300 didn't even have graphics but no such hassles ...

Yeah, everybody may hate X but ... well ... it works. That's worth something.

RDP or something like it would be nice, but I don't think it exists on mac, either.

Yeah, I couldn't find anything like that either. Classy should have a better idear ?

I see you've taken up sailing ? If you can, grab something little like a Mirror dinghy. More fun than a barrel of monkeys :-)

guardian452
Donor
From Kentucky, United States
Who joined Aug. 21, 2007, 10:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 25, 2015, 8:06 p.m...

Vnc works great. I just have to have a monitor plugged into the computer when it boots up, or otherwise the desktop is not accelerated. This also means the beefy radeon in the mac can do the heavy lifting, instead of whatever crappy graphics are in my laptop, which is kind of the opposite of how X works.

Seems the easiest thing is to plug in a monitor, which is why products like this exist. It just feels like there should be an easier way, but at that point I may as well plug in a monitor. The monitor doesn't even have to be connected to power, so long as the edid is there.

The picture is a few years old. That is my grandparent's boat, although I used to spend a lot of time in lasers when I was a kid.

Grandpa actually had a mirror hanging in the garage for a long time. At some point I asked them about it, but they had given it away by then

Google: Don't Be Evil. Apple: Don't Be Greedy. Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.

ClassicHasClass
Donor
From Sunny So Cal
Who joined July 25, 2012, 7:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 25, 2015, 8:20 p.m...

No idea, actually. All of my VNCable systems (two Power Macs, one Intel) are hooked up to KVMs anyway, and none of them are later than 10.6.

smit happens.

:Fuel:

bigred , 900MHz R16K, 4GB RAM, V12 DCD, 6.5.30
:Indy:

indy , 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
:Indigo2IMP:

purplehaze , 175MHz R10000, Solid IMPACT
probably posted from

bruce , Quad 2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 16GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
plus IBM POWER6 p520 * Apple Network Server 500 * HP C8000 * BeBox * Solbourne S3000 * Commodore 128 * many more...

hamei
From over the rainbow
Who joined Feb. 24, 2004, 4:10 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 26, 2015, 12:42 a.m...

guardian452 wrote: That is my grandparent's boat, although I used to spend a lot of time in lasers when I was a kid. Grandpa actually had a mirror hanging in the garage for a long time. At some point I asked them about it, but they had given it away by then

Oh

I've had a 5 meter, a Dragon and a Lester Stone yawl, but the Mirror was the funnest of all. Had a blonde bimbo gold-digger (boy did she screw up her research) girlfriend who tried to kill me with a Laser ... you can't take two people and a snack on a Laser very well. And you can't relax at all. The Mirror ... it's just big enough to stick two people in and it has a main, a jib and can have a spinnaker, like a real boat. But it's tiny and cheap and you can flog it to death without any bad result.

A cheap simple dinghy like that is great. Best toy I've had in my whole life, maybe.

guardian452
Donor
From Kentucky, United States
Who joined Aug. 21, 2007, 10:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 26, 2015, 10:02 a.m...

ClassicHasClass wrote: No idea, actually. All of my VNCable systems (two Power Macs, one Intel) are hooked up to KVMs anyway, and none of them are later than 10.6.

I booted into 10.6, it does the same thing. As soon as you plug a monitor in, the desktop becomes accelerated. Don't even have to plug the monitor into power. Don't have to reboot, pass go, or collect $200. Just plug in a monitor.

Anyways it seems the easiest thing is to just leave a monitor plugged in :shock:

Google: Don't Be Evil. Apple: Don't Be Greedy. Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.

hamei
From over the rainbow
Who joined Feb. 24, 2004, 4:10 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 26, 2015, 6:11 p.m...

guardian452 wrote: Anyways it seems the easiest thing is to just leave a monitor plugged in

Do you s'pose it's looking for an edid ? I've seen edid-liars, just a cable with a little bit of electronics that lies to the computer about what's connected.

ClassicHasClass
Donor
From Sunny So Cal
Who joined July 25, 2012, 7:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 26, 2015, 8:38 p.m...

I have one of those for another system and it works well, but I thought G wasn't interested in dongles.

("No Dong Missile?" "The poor missile doesn't have a dong!" "We should staple our dongs to it!" "No! Don't staple your dongs to my missile!" -- Jackass North Korea)

smit happens.

:Fuel:

bigred , 900MHz R16K, 4GB RAM, V12 DCD, 6.5.30
:Indy:

indy , 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
:Indigo2IMP:

purplehaze , 175MHz R10000, Solid IMPACT
probably posted from

bruce , Quad 2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 16GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
plus IBM POWER6 p520 * Apple Network Server 500 * HP C8000 * BeBox * Solbourne S3000 * Commodore 128 * many more...

guardian452
Donor
From Kentucky, United States
Who joined Aug. 21, 2007, 10:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 27, 2015, 6:45 a.m...

Right, I even posted a link to such a device above. If I am going to plug something in I may as well just leave a monitor plugged in. (I don't have one of those things, but I do have an otherwise-spare monitor). Passive (e.g. mDP-to-DVI) adapters don't work. Maybe an active (e.g. mDP-to-DLDVI) adapter would, but I don't have one of those.

I assumed surely there was a way to do this without having anything plugged in.

Google: Don't Be Evil. Apple: Don't Be Greedy. Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.

Dennis Nedry
Who joined Aug. 23, 2007, 6:48 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 31, 2015, 1:13 a.m...

Yup.

I've filed so many bug reports on this issue alone it's ridiculous. The few responses I got back from Apple Engineering were all along the line of "we're doing things the way we think they should be done and you're clearly wrong".

OS X won't enable a GPU unless it has a monitor plugged into it. There is no way around this, short of hex editing the kernel extensions, but even then I never got anywhere with that. If the local GPU is disabled, then OS X will default to a software rendering system which is capped to 1280x1024 due to severe performance issues (as you've already found out). Those issues are so bad under 10.9 and 10.10 that VNC is virtually unusable without a GPU installed and active in the system.

You can either plug in a monitor, or invest in one of those fake HDMI or Mini DisplayPort "monitor emulators" that trick OS X into thinking a display is connected. HOWEVER , there is a pretty serious caveat with this- if your dongle emulator reports a display size greater then 2560x1600, OS X 10.9 and above will think that it's a HiDPI display and completely screw up your VNC connection to the point of being utterly worthless. There is no way to disable that functionality, so if you're buying a dongle make sure it's not a 4K model (like the CompuLab fit-Headless 4K).

TLDR; remote controlling OS X is a huge bag of hurt. Apple don't give a shit, and there are no workarounds

. Welcome to the future of consumer oriented computing...

-DN

I've got butterfingers!

ClassicHasClass
Donor
From Sunny So Cal
Who joined July 25, 2012, 7:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 31, 2015, 12:32 p.m...

Tiger forever.

smit happens.

:Fuel:

bigred , 900MHz R16K, 4GB RAM, V12 DCD, 6.5.30
:Indy:

indy , 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
:Indigo2IMP:

purplehaze , 175MHz R10000, Solid IMPACT
probably posted from

bruce , Quad 2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 16GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
plus IBM POWER6 p520 * Apple Network Server 500 * HP C8000 * BeBox * Solbourne S3000 * Commodore 128 * many more...

ClassicHasClass
Donor
From Sunny So Cal
Who joined July 25, 2012, 7:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 31, 2015, 12:44 p.m...

Incidentally, in case you didn't get the No Dong reference,

http://www.mojvideo.com/video-super-new ... 1d7761e38e

smit happens.

:Fuel:

bigred , 900MHz R16K, 4GB RAM, V12 DCD, 6.5.30
:Indy:

indy , 150MHz R4400SC, 256MB RAM, XL24, 6.5.10
:Indigo2IMP:

purplehaze , 175MHz R10000, Solid IMPACT
probably posted from

bruce , Quad 2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP, 16GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.11
plus IBM POWER6 p520 * Apple Network Server 500 * HP C8000 * BeBox * Solbourne S3000 * Commodore 128 * many more...

guardian452
Donor
From Kentucky, United States
Who joined Aug. 21, 2007, 10:12 p.m.

Wrote the following at July 31, 2015, 2:48 p.m...

Dennis Nedry wrote: Yup.

I've filed so many bug reports on this issue alone it's ridiculous. The few responses I got back from Apple Engineering were all along the line of "we're doing things the way we think they should be done and you're clearly wrong".

OS X won't enable a GPU unless it has a monitor plugged into it. There is no way around this, short of hex editing the kernel extensions, but even then I never got anywhere with that. If the local GPU is disabled, then OS X will default to a software rendering system which is capped to 1280x1024 due to severe performance issues (as you've already found out). Those issues are so bad under 10.9 and 10.10 that VNC is virtually unusable without a GPU installed and active in the system.

You can either plug in a monitor, or invest in one of those fake HDMI or Mini DisplayPort "monitor emulators" that trick OS X into thinking a display is connected. HOWEVER , there is a pretty serious caveat with this- if your dongle emulator reports a display size greater then 2560x1600, OS X 10.9 and above will think that it's a HiDPI display and completely screw up your VNC connection to the point of being utterly worthless. There is no way to disable that functionality, so if you're buying a dongle make sure it's not a 4K model (like the CompuLab fit-Headless 4K).

TLDR; remote controlling OS X is a huge bag of hurt. Apple don't give a shit, and there are no workarounds . Welcome to the future of consumer oriented computing...

-DN

I have installed the program called DisplayMenu. You can set whatever display mode you want, HiDPI or not, from the menu bar. With or without a display plugged in. I was using 1920x1080 non-retina unaccelerated. The performance is not *that* bad. http://displaymenu.milchimgemuesefach.de/ HiDPI is not related to screen resolution but DPI. E.G. a 3840x2160 50" screen will not be considered hi-dpi. But a 24" screen at the same resolution will be.

Google: Don't Be Evil. Apple: Don't Be Greedy. Microsoft: Don't Be Stupid.

nyef
Who joined April 28, 2015, 7:54 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 1, 2015, 8:55 a.m...

Dennis Nedry wrote: TLDR; remote controlling OS X is a huge bag of hurt. Apple don't give a shit, and there are no workarounds . Welcome to the future of consumer oriented computing...

In general, remote controlling OS X is a huge bag of hurt. You want POSIX APIs that actually work? Reliable SIGTRAP handling? User programs not to be able to crash the kernel? Suspend-to-disk to function correctly? :lol:

I have a Mac Mini that I bought specifically to run an up-to-date OSX environment for work reasons (primary requirements: Skype, GoToMeeting, VNC, a real keyboard, not bloody Windows, and can keep its state if left unplugged for three weeks). But the lack of working suspend-to-disk renders the machine useless in my particular scenario. I can't even reasonably use it as a media machine, because iTunes loses track of where it was when the system restarts. At this point I'm debating installing Linux on it, even though I have no current use for another x86oid Linux box. :roll:

armanox
From Baltimore, MD, USA
Who joined Feb. 23, 2014, 9:31 p.m.

Wrote the following at Aug. 31, 2015, 11:53 a.m...

Dennis Nedry wrote: Yup.

I've filed so many bug reports on this issue alone it's ridiculous. The few responses I got back from Apple Engineering were all along the line of "we're doing things the way we think they should be done and you're clearly wrong".

OS X won't enable a GPU unless it has a monitor plugged into it. There is no way around this, short of hex editing the kernel extensions, but even then I never got anywhere with that. If the local GPU is disabled, then OS X will default to a software rendering system which is capped to 1280x1024 due to severe performance issues (as you've already found out). Those issues are so bad under 10.9 and 10.10 that VNC is virtually unusable without a GPU installed and active in the system.

You think that's bad, you should see how Windows handles GPUs. The GPU might be active without a display attached (on my desktop, if I want to be able to run OpenCL on the HD3000 embedded on my CPU (with everything else using a real GPU) I have to plug a monitor in. If I RDP into my desktop, or use VNC, I lose the ability to use the GPU regardless of if it is plugged in to something.

"Apollo was astonished, Dionysus thought me mad."
:Octane: