x11vnc allows one to remotely view and interact with real X displays (i.e. a display corresponding to a physical monitor, keyboard, and mouse) with any VNC viewer. In this way x11vnc plays the role for Unix/X11 that WinVNC plays for Windows.

I wrote x11vnc because x0rfbserver was basically impossible to build on Solaris and had poor performance. The primary x0rfbserver build problems centered around esoteric C++ toolkits. x11vnc is written in plain C and uses only standard libraries. I also added a few enhancements to improve the interactive response, add esoteric features, etc.

For Unix, the VNC implementation includes a virtual X11 server Xvnc (usually launched via the vncserver command) that is not associated with a physical display, but provides a "fake" one X11 clients (xterm, mozilla, etc.) can attach to. A remote user then connects to Xvnc via the VNC client vncviewer from anywhere on the network to view and interact with the whole virtual X11 desktop.

The VNC protocol is in most cases better suited for remote connections with low bandwidth and high latency than is the X11 protocol (the exception is cached pixmap data on the viewing-end). Also, with no state maintained the viewing-end can crash, be rebooted, or relocated and the applications and desktop continue running. Not so with X11.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· x11vnc's SSL encryption is extended to support the VeNCrypt and TLS VNC security types.
· An increasing number of viewers support the former.
· Anonymous Diffie-Hellman key exchange support is provided, and Certificate Revocation Lists are implemented.
· The Java viewer applet is downloadable via the VNC port as well as the HTTP port.
· If x11vnc is not built with the Avahi Zeroconf library, an external helper program is used instead.
· A launcher for naive users is provided in x11vnc.desktop.
· The solid background color option works on the Mac OS X console.