ChangeLog.md

2.2.6

Significant changes relative to 2.2.5:

1. The TurboVNC Server, if started with the -nevershared argument, now rejects new connections more gracefully, by sending an RFB authentication failure message to the potential viewer to notify it of the reason behind the rejection.

2.2.5

Significant changes relative to 2.2.4:

1. The value of the MenuKey parameter in the Java TurboVNC Viewer is now case-insensitive.

2. Fixed several issues in the Java TurboVNC Viewer that prevented the configuration hierarchy (Options dialog > command line > previous settings) from being honored for certain parameters in some cases (particularly when using listen mode or making multiple connections from the same viewer instance.)

3. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer's built-in SSH client whereby the SSH host key for a given TurboVNC host was not added to the list of known hosts unless the SSH known hosts file (~/.ssh/known_hosts) already existed.

4. Introduced a new Java system property (turbovnc.sshbannerdlg) that, when set to 0, causes the Java TurboVNC Viewer's built-in SSH client to display the SSH server's banner message on the command line rather than in a dialog box.

5. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, in listen mode, the full-screen mode setting did not take effect if it was changed in the Default Options dialog.

6. The external SSH feature in the Java TurboVNC Viewer now redirects input and output from the SSH subprocess to the console that launched the viewer. In addition to allowing external SSH issues to be diagnosed more easily, this also allows interactive SSH authentication methods to be used on Windows. Furthermore, the Java TurboVNC Viewer now throws an error if the SSH subprocess fails to launch for any reason.

7. Fixed visual artifacts that occurred when using Hextile encoding in the Java TurboVNC Viewer with OpenGL Java 2D blitting enabled (which is the default on Mac platforms.)

8. Fixed an issue in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer whereby, in listen mode, the /jpeg, /nojpeg, and /quality command-line arguments did not take effect.

9. The TurboVNC Viewer Options dialog can now be used to allow or disallow Alt-Enter as an alternate hotkey for toggling full-screen mode.

10. Fixed an issue in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer whereby, if keyboard grabbing was enabled, using the Windows-L key sequence to lock the computer caused the Windows key (or its Un*x equivalent, the left Super key) to become stuck in the pressed state on the server. Fixed a similar issue in the Windows and Windows/Java TurboVNC Viewers whereby, if keyboard grabbing was enabled, using the Ctrl-Windows-Left or Ctrl-Windows-Right key sequence to switch virtual desktops caused the Windows key to become stuck in the pressed state on the client.

11. Fixed an issue in the Windows/Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, if keyboard grabbing was enabled, using Alt-Tab to select another window in the TurboVNC session sometimes caused the Tab key to become stuck in the pressed state on the server.

12. Fixed multiple issues with the handling of X.509 certificates in the Java TurboVNC Viewer:

    • Fixed an issue whereby the viewer would not save an untrusted certificate if a different certificate with the same Distinguished Name (DN) had already been saved.
    • The viewer now throws an error if a certificate is not yet valid (i.e. if the start of its validity period is in the future), regardless of whether the certificate is trusted.
    • The viewer now asks for confirmation from the user before accepting an expired certificate, regardless of whether the certificate is trusted.
    • Fixed an issue whereby the viewer would not save an untrusted certificate if the saved certificates file already existed.
    • The viewer no longer displays a confirmation dialog if hostname verification fails for a saved certificate.

13. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby None and VNC were effectively removed from the security types list after clicking "OK" in the TurboVNC Viewer Options dialog, if one of those security types had been specified in the SecurityTypes parameter along with one of the TLS* or X509* security types.

14. The RPM and DEB packages generated by the TurboVNC build/packaging system now include a PolicyKit Local Authority (.pkla) file that prevents various authentication dialogs ("Authentication is required to create a color managed device", "Authentication is required to access the PC/SC daemon", "Authentication is required to refresh the system repositories") from popping up when using the GNOME 3 window manager with the TurboVNC Server on various Linux distributions.

15. Fixed an issue in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer whereby keyboard grabbing was always initially disabled in the second and subsequent connections initiated by the viewer, regardless of the grab mode.

2.2.4

Significant changes relative to 2.2.3:

1. The Windows/Java TurboVNC Viewer now works around an issue whereby the operating system does not send a key release event to applications if one of the Shift keys is released while the other Shift key remains pressed. This issue did not affect the native Windows TurboVNC Viewer, since it does not distinguish between the left and right Shift keys.

2. The TurboVNC Viewer now transmits an XK_KP_Separator (0xFFAC) key symbol rather than an XK_KP_Decimal (0xFFAE) key symbol for the keypad decimal key if the client's locale uses a comma rather than a period for a decimal symbol. This emulates the behavior of Linux.

3. Fixed an error ("JRELoadError") that occurred when attempting to use the Mac TurboVNC Viewer app with Java 13.

4. It is no longer necessary to set the JAVA_HOME environment variable in order to use the Mac TurboVNC Viewer app with Java 11 and later.

5. Fixed an issue whereby, if the physical screens on the client had mismatched resolutions or were offset, the TurboVNC Viewer would not use all of the available screen real estate in full-screen mode with multi-screen spanning enabled. The viewer now properly fills all screens in this case, as long as automatic desktop resizing is enabled and the VNC server supports Xinerama (multiple virtual screens), i.e. if the server's virtual screen layout is being set based on the client's physical screen layout.

6. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer should now build properly with Visual Studio

8. The TurboVNC Server is now based on xorg-xserver 1.19.7, which fixes several minor X server bugs.

9. The TurboVNC Server now supports the X Record Extension. This extension can be disabled, if desired, by passing -extension XTEST to vncserver.

2.2.3

Significant changes relative to 2.2.2:

1. The Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange algorithm is now supported by the TurboVNC Server when using OpenSSL 1.0.2 or later.

2. A new security configuration file directive (permitted-cipher-suites) in the TurboVNC Server and a new Java system property (turbovnc.ciphersuites) in the Java TurboVNC Viewer can now be used to specify a list of permitted TLS cipher suites for the TLS* and X509* security types.

3. Fixed an issue in the Mac TurboVNC Viewer whereby drawing tablet stylus buttons were ignored or mapped to incorrect mouse button events.

4. The built-in HTTP server in the TurboVNC Server now accepts : and @ in any TurboVNC Viewer parameters that are appended to the URL. This allows for specifying an SSH user name in the Via parameter and an RFB display/port in the Server parameter.

5. The X RandR outputs in the TurboVNC Server have been renamed to "VNC-0", "VNC-1", etc. This prevents a dialog ("Authentication is required to create a color managed device") from popping up when using the GNOME 3 window manager on recent Linux distributions, including Fedora, RHEL 8, and Ubuntu 18 and later.

6. Fixed a packaging regression, introduced by 2.2 beta1[17], that prevented full-screen multi-screen spanning from working properly with the Mac TurboVNC Viewer app.

7. Fixed a regression introduced by 2.2 beta1[11] that caused the TurboVNC Server to leak memory when certain X11 applications or frameworks requested that clipboard updates from the X server be converted to UTF-8 (by calling XConvertSelection() with a target of xaUTF8_STRING.)

8. Fixed an error ("java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Error in security property. Constraint unknown: ECDH_ DH_RSA") that occurred when attempting to use any of the TLS* security types with the Java TurboVNC Viewer running under Java 7u211, 8u201, 11.0.2, or later with OpenSSL 1.1.x.

9. Fixed an issue (CVE-2019-15683) in the TurboVNC Server whereby a specially-crafted VNC viewer could be used to remotely trigger a stack overflow in the server by sending it a malformed RFB Fence message. This issue could never have been encountered when using any of the VNC viewers that currently support the RFB Fence message (TurboVNC and TigerVNC.) Furthermore, since exploiting the issue would have first required successfully authenticating with a TurboVNC session, the issue did not generally provide an attack vector for anyone other than the session owner and any collaborators authorized by the owner.

10. Fixed various issues with remote mouse events that would occur when running the Linux TurboVNC Viewer in a Wayland session.

11. The TurboVNC Server now generates a 2048-bit DSA key for use with the TLS* security types. This fixed an error ("dh key too small") that occurred when attempting to connect, using one of those security types, to a TurboVNC session running on a RHEL 8 host. It also fixed an error ("javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: DHPublicKey does not comply to algorithm constraints") that occurred when attempting to connect, using one of the TLS* security types, to a TurboVNC session with the Linux TurboVNC Viewer running on a RHEL 8 client. A new security configuration file directive (tls-key-length) can be used to restore the behavior of previous releases of TurboVNC (generating a 1024-bit DSA key) or to increase the key length for additional security.

2.2.2

Significant changes relative to 2.2.1:

1. Fixed an error ("javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException: No appropriate protocol (protocol is disabled or cipher suites are inappropriate)") that occurred when attempting to use any of the TLS* security types with the Java TurboVNC Viewer running under Java 7u211, 8u201, 11.0.2, or later.

2. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer's built-in SSH client whereby values for the ServerAliveInterval keyword in the OpenSSH config file were interpreted as milliseconds rather than seconds. This caused the SSH connection to fail if the value specified for ServerAliveInterval was too low.

3. Fixed a regression introduced by 2.2.1[6] that caused constant flickering in the UltraVNC Viewer when it was used with the TurboVNC Server.

4. Fixed an issue in the TurboVNC Server whereby, if interframe comparison was enabled and the remote desktop was resized to a smaller size, the server would sometimes send a framebuffer update that exceeded the new desktop dimensions. This crashed the UltraVNC Viewer.

5. Fixed a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability in the TurboVNC Server that was exposed when many RFB connections were made to the server and never dropped, thus exceeding the Xvnc process's allotment of file descriptors. When this occurred, it triggered an infinite loop whereby the TurboVNC Server's listener socket handler returned immediately with an EMFILE ("Too many open files") error, but the handler continued to be called by the X.Org code because the incoming RFB connection never succeeded. This infinite loop prevented the TurboVNC session owner from launching any X11 programs in the session (since those require Unix domain socket connections) until one or more of the RFB connections dropped, and the continuous flood of error messages in the session log caused the log to grow by megabytes per second until all available disk space was exhausted. The TurboVNC Server now sets a reasonable RFB connection limit (which can be adjusted using a new Xvnc argument, -maxconnections) and rejects all new connections once this limit has been reached. The upper limit for -maxconnections should be low enough to avoid the aforementioned EMFILE error and infinite loop.

6. Fixed an issue in the Linux/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer whereby, if multiple buttons on an extended input device (such as a drawing tablet) were pressed or released in rapid succession, some of those button events could accidentally be discarded by the TurboVNC Helper under certain circumstances, leading to a loss of synchronization between the client's and the TurboVNC session's extended input device button state. From the point of view of applications running in the TurboVNC session, the extended input device buttons appeared to stick in the down or up position.

2.2.1

Significant changes relative to 2.2:

1. The standalone Mac TurboVNC Viewer app will now use the JRE pointed to by the JAVA_HOME environment variable, if that variable is defined. This facilitates using the viewer with Java 11, which doesn't provide a separate JRE and thus doesn't install anything under /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin (the directory in which the Mac TurboVNC Viewer app launcher normally looks for a JRE.)

2. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer packages no longer include a custom build of PuTTY. An optimized version of PuTTY 0.60 was originally included in TurboVNC 0.4/Sun Shared Visualization 1.1 because, at the time, the stock version of PuTTY was slow, and installing OpenSSH generally required Cygwin. The custom build of PuTTY was retained in TurboVNC 1.2, because few Windows SSH implementations had proper IPv6 support at the time. However, in 2018, numerous Windows SSH clients will work properly with the TurboVNC Viewer, and generally with better performance than our custom build of PuTTY.

3. Fixed an issue in the vncserver script whereby generating an initial one-time password (OTP) would fail if X11 TCP connections were disabled (which is now the default, because of 2.2 beta1[8]) and the hostname of the TurboVNC host resolved to its external IP address rather than to its local IP address.

4. The Java TurboVNC Viewer will now display all informational messages and warnings from its built-in SSH client whenever the logging level is >= 110.

5. The built-in SSH client in the Java TurboVNC Viewer has been improved in the following ways:

   • The SSH client will now prompt for an SSH key passphrase if one is required but has not been specified using the SSHKeyPass parameter. This emulates the behavior of OpenSSH.
   • The SSH Password dialog will no longer be displayed unless SSH password authentication is necessary. Previously, the dialog was displayed even if the hostname was invalid.
   • Closing the SSH Password dialog will now immediately cancel SSH authentication.
   • The SSH client will now automatically read and process the OpenSSH configuration file stored in ~/.ssh/config (or the location specified in the SSHConfig parameter), if the file exists. Parameters read from the OpenSSH configuration file will take precedence over any TurboVNC Viewer parameters.
   • A new Java system property (turbovnc.sshauth) can be used to enable or disable SSH authentication methods, as well as to specify their preferred order.

6. Fixed a race condition in the TurboVNC Server that, under rare circumstances, caused the TurboVNC Viewer to incorrectly assume that the server did not support remote desktop resizing.

7. Fixed an issue in the vncserver script whereby changing the value of $vncUserDir in turbovncserver.conf did not change the default locations of the VNC password file, the X.509 certificate file, and the X.509 private key file. The script now defers setting the default locations of those files until after turbovncserver.conf is read, and the script now allows the locations of all three files to be specified in turbovncserver.conf.

8. The vncserver script now allows VirtualGL to be enabled using the turbovncserver.conf file.

9. The vncserver script now allows the window manager startup script to be specified using a new command-line option (-wm) or turbovncserver.conf variable ($wm.) This is useful when starting TurboVNC sessions at boot time, and for other situations in which setting the TVNC_WM environment variable is not possible.

10. The TurboVNC Server now properly handles installations in which the system-wide TurboVNC configuration file (turbovncserver.conf) and security configuration file (turbovncserver-security.conf) are located in a directory other than /etc.

11. Introduced a new turbovncserver.conf variable ($serverArgs) that can be used to specify additional arguments for Xvnc. This allows any TurboVNC Server option to be enabled or disabled on a system-wide or per-user basis, even if that option has no corresponding turbovncserver.conf variable.

12. Fixed an issue in the Windows/Java and Un*x TurboVNC Viewers whereby, when pressing and releasing both the left and right locations of a particular modifier key (Shift, Ctrl, Alt, etc.), only one of the key releases was sent to the VNC server. Fixed a similar issue in the Mac TurboVNC Viewer under Java 11 whereby, when pressing and releasing both the left and right Alt keys in the same order, a left Alt key press and an AltGr key release (or vice versa) were sent to the VNC server.

13. Fixed a segfault in the TurboVNC Server that occurred, under rare circumstances, when a viewer disconnected.

14. Fixed an issue in the TurboVNC Server, introduced by 2.2 beta1[11], that prevented client-to-server clipboard transfers from working properly with some Qt applications.

2.2

Significant changes relative to 2.2 beta1:

1. The Alt button in the Java/Mac/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer toolbar now works properly. Previously, it was sending an Alt key press and a Ctrl key release.

2. Fixed an issue whereby, when using certain Command-{key} sequences in the Mac TurboVNC Viewer (specifically: Command-`, which switches between the two most recent viewer windows; Command-H, which hides all viewer windows; Command-Q, which exits the viewer; and Command-P, which toggles the profiling dialog), {key} was unintentionally transmitted to the VNC server.

3. Fixed a segfault in the TurboVNC Server that occurred when attempting to disable the Composite extension. This was a regression caused by a bug in the xorg-xserver 1.19.6 code.

4. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now works around an issue whereby the desktop contents would not be displayed when running the GNOME Classic window manager on RHEL/CentOS 7 or recent Fedora releases.

5. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now launches Unity 2D by default on Ubuntu 12, as was the case with TurboVNC 2.1.x. Unity 3D 5.20.x does not work properly with the TurboVNC X server, and Unity 2D provides a similar user experience.

6. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now properly launches the GNOME 3, GNOME Flashback (Metacity), and MATE window managers on Ubuntu 18.

7. Fixed an issue whereby the TurboVNC Server would fail to launch via the vncserver script (giving the error Unrecognized option: -x509cert) if the server was built with TVNC_USETLS=OpenSSL or TVNC_USETLS=GnuTLS and the OpenSSL or GnuTLS headers/libraries were not installed.

8. The -list option for the vncserver script no longer lists orphaned TurboVNC sessions (sessions for which a PID file exists in the user's VNC directory but for which the corresponding Xvnc process is no longer running.)

9. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, when using SSH tunneling with the built-in SSH client, the SSH connection would remain open even if the associated VNC connection had been closed.

10. Fixed an issue in the vncviewer-javaw.bat script, which is used to launch the Java TurboVNC Viewer on Windows without a console window, whereby jawt.dll would not be found when using certain versions of the Oracle JRE.

11. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now builds successfully with JDK 11.

12. Fixed an issue in the Mac TurboVNC Viewer whereby the "Preferences..." option in the VncViewer menu (and its associated hotkey, Command-,) would pop up a new copy of the Options dialog even if the Options dialog was already visible.

13. Worked around an issue in Java 9 through 11 that caused the Profiling dialog in the Mac TurboVNC Viewer to immediately disappear if it was popped up using the Command-P hotkey.

2.2 beta1

Significant changes relative to 2.1.2:

1. Added a system menu option and hotkey (CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-V) to the Windows TurboVNC Viewer that can be used to quickly toggle view-only mode on and off.

2. Added system menu options and hotkeys to the Windows TurboVNC Viewer that can be used to zoom in and out (increase or decrease the scaling factor) or reset the view to 100% when desktop scaling is enabled.

3. The TurboVNC Server now includes a GLX extension that uses the swrast DRI driver installed on the system to perform unaccelerated OpenGL rendering. Using VirtualGL for OpenGL rendering will still be much faster and more compatible, but this feature allows the TurboVNC Server to be used for casual OpenGL rendering if VirtualGL is not installed. Passing -extension GLX to vncserver disables the extension. Note that your system must have Mesa 8.x or later installed in order for the swrast DRI driver to be available. On systems that do not have vendor-specific GPU drivers installed, or on systems that provide a libglvnd-enabled build of Mesa, the TurboVNC Server's GLX extension will use direct rendering, which improves performance and compatibility.

4. Java 6 and earlier is no longer supported with the Java/Mac/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer. This increases the Mac system requirements to OS X 10.7 "Lion" or later. Apple's obsolete Java for OS X is no longer supported, and the standalone "AppleJava" version of the TurboVNC Viewer is no longer provided. Java SE 6 ceased receiving public updates in 2013 and, as of this writing, critical bug fixes and security fixes for that platform are only available with an Oracle Extended Support contract. Furthermore, Red Hat ceased supporting OpenJDK 6 in late 2016. The TurboVNC Viewer JAR will continue to be built with -source 1.6 -target 1.6, but it will only be tested with Oracle Java SE releases that are currently receiving public updates and OpenJDK releases that are actively supported by Red Hat. The 2.1.x version of the TurboVNC Viewer will continue to support Java 6 on a break/fix basis.

5. The ability to run the Java TurboVNC Viewer as an in-browser applet has been removed. Most popular web browsers have already abandoned the NPAPI plugin standard around which the Java plugin was designed, because that plugin standard grants full access to the client machine. However, such access is necessary in order to write a full-featured application (including a VNC viewer), and absent any other cross-browser plugin standard, it would be impossible for Oracle to make the Java plugin more secure without abandoning the write-once-run-anywhere nature of the Java language. Thus, they have chosen not to include any kind of browser plugin in Java 9. As of this writing, NPAPI support can only be obtained on most platforms by installing an older browser version. The only advantage of using the TurboVNC Viewer as an applet, as opposed to with Java Web Start, was the ability to embed the viewer in a web page, but this mode of operation had some known usability issues and was increasingly receiving little or no attention from the TurboVNC community. The applet feature will continue to be supported in TurboVNC 2.1.x on a break/fix basis.

6. The TurboVNC Server now has full support for the Xinerama extension, which allows multiple virtual screens to be configured within the same remote desktop. This provides better usability for multi-screen environments, since dialogs and maximized application windows are no longer split across screen boundaries. The server's screen layout can be configured in the following ways:

   • Multi-screen geometry descriptors, in the format W0xH0+X0+Y0[,W1xH1+X1+Y1,...,WnxHn+Xn+Yn]], are now accepted in these places:

     • The TurboVNC Server's -geometry command-line argument and the $geometry variable in turbovncserver.conf (thus allowing the user to specify a screen layout for the initial framebuffer)
     • The "Remote desktop size" combo box in the TurboVNC Viewer's Options dialog, the TurboVNC Viewer's -desktopsize command-line argument, and the DesktopSize parameter in the Java TurboVNC Viewer (thus allowing the user to remotely request a specific screen layout)
     • A new .vnc connection info file directive (desktopsize) that can be used instead of the resizemode, desktopwidth, and desktopheight directives

   • The automatic desktop resize feature in the TurboVNC Viewer is now multi-screen aware in both windowed and full-screen modes. When the viewer window is resized or reset to its default position, the viewer will now compute and request a new server-side screen layout that matches not only the viewer window boundaries but also the client's screen boundaries and the position of the taskbar/menu bar on the client. The single-screen automatic desktop resizing behavior of the TurboVNC 2.1.x viewer can be restored by setting the TVNC_SINGLESCREEN environment variable or the turbovnc.singlescreen Java system property to 1.

   • The X RandR extension can be used, either from the command line (xrandr) or through the window manager's display configuration applet, to modify the server's screen layout.

7. The TurboVNC Server is now based on xorg-xserver 1.19.6, which improves compatibility with newer window managers.

8. By default, the TurboVNC Server will no longer listen on a TCP socket for X11 protocol connections from X11 applications. This mimics the behavior of most modern X servers, which require X11 connections to be made using Unix domain sockets. To restore the behavior of previous versions of TurboVNC, pass -listen tcp to vncserver (assuming that X11 TCP connections are not globally disabled in the TurboVNC Server's security configuration file.)

9. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates will no longer start a 2D window manager by default on Ubuntu systems, since the TurboVNC Server now has a software OpenGL implementation that supports running Unity 3D without VirtualGL. The xstartup.turbovnc script will now always attempt to start the window manager specified by the system or user defaults, unless the TVNC_WM environment variable is set. Setting the TVNC_WM environment variable to 2d will start the GNOME fallback/flashback or Unity 2D session on Ubuntu systems instead of Unity 3D. Setting the TVNC_WM environment variable to 2d will also start the GNOME classic session on RHEL 7 and recent Fedora releases. To start MATE, set the TVNC_WM environment variable to mate-session.

10. The -3dwm option for the vncserver script has been renamed to -vgl, to reflect the fact that the TurboVNC Server is now able to run 3D window managers without using VirtualGL.

11. Clipboard synchronization is now performed within the TurboVNC Server process, so the tvncconfig utility is no longer needed or provided.

12. The TurboVNC Server now uses a 30-bit default visual (BGRX 10/10/10/2 on little endian machines and XRGB 2/10/10/10 on big endian machines) when launched with -depth 30. This is mainly useful for application testing at the moment, since the pixels are downsampled to 8-bit RGB prior to transmission.

13. Introduced a new CMake variable (TVNC_SYSTEMLIBS) that, when enabled, will cause the TurboVNC Server to be built against the system-supplied versions of zlib, bzip2, and FreeType.

14. Introduced a new CMake variable (TVNC_SYSTEMX11) that, when enabled, will cause the TurboVNC Server to be built against the system-supplied versions of the X11 and OpenGL headers and libraries. This will probably fail unless the system is using xorg-server 1.19.x or later.

15. Fixed a bug in the TurboVNC Server's VeNCrypt implementation that prevented it from working properly with LibVNCClient.

16. The TurboVNC Server and Windows TurboVNC Viewer, when built with TVNC_SYSTEMLIBS=0 (which is the default), now incorporate the Intel zlib library, which accelerates zlib encoding and decoding significantly on SSE2-equipped CPUs. This improves the end-to-end performance of the Lossless Tight + Zlib encoding method, and of non-JPEG (low-color-depth) subrectangles encoded with one of the Tight + JPEG encoding methods, by approximately 20-40%.

17. The Mac/Java TurboVNC Viewer now includes remote drawing tablet support. This feature is implemented using a TurboVNC Helper JNI library, which is similar to the TurboVNC Helper included with the Un*x TurboVNC Viewer. This library connects the built-in drawing tablet drivers for OS X with the existing remote X Input feature in the Java TurboVNC Viewer and TurboVNC Server.

18. Fixed an issue in the Un*x/X11 TurboVNC Viewer and the Windows/Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby keyboard grabbing was always initially disabled in the second and subsequent connections initiated by the viewer, regardless of the grab mode.

19. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now builds and runs with Java 9 and later.

20. The SSH tunneling feature in the Java TurboVNC Viewer now works properly when the SSH username contains a @ character.

21. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer now disables the Windows IME (Input Method Editor) system in the TurboVNC Viewer window. This system is normally used to input language-specific characters in Asian languages, but since the TurboVNC Viewer does not handle those characters, the IME does nothing but interfere with the normal operation of the viewer.

22. Introduced a new security configuration file directive (no-remote-resize) that can be used to disable remote desktop resizing on a system-wide basis.

23. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now saves the current options as defaults when "OK" is clicked to dismiss the Options dialog. This more closely mimics the behavior of the Windows TurboVNC Viewer and other applications.

24. The TurboVNC Server now enables multithreaded Tight encoding by default. Because of 2.1.2[1], there is no longer any danger of incompatibility with non-TurboVNC viewers when using this feature with default settings, so there is no downside to enabling it.

2.1.2

Significant changes relative to 2.1.1:

1. Improved the usability of multithreaded Tight encoding in the TurboVNC Server:

   • The TVNC_MT and TVNC_NTHREADS environment variables now have corresponding Xvnc command-line options (-mt and -nthreads), which makes it easy to enable multithreaded Tight encoding in TurboVNC Server instances spawned by init.d/systemd.
   • The turbovncserver.conf file, which is parsed by the vncserver script, now includes two new variables ($multiThread and $numThreads) that can be used to configure multithreading on a system-wide basis or for all TurboVNC sessions started under a particular user account.
   • Previously, if multithreaded Tight encoding was enabled, the Tight encoder would use as many threads as there were CPU cores on the TurboVNC host, up to a maximum of 8. However, because of limitations in the Tight encoding type, using more than 4 threads requires the rfbTightNoZlib extension, which is only supported by the TurboVNC Viewer. To avoid confusion, the TurboVNC Server will no longer use more than 4 threads (regardless of the number of CPU cores) unless the thread count is explicitly specified.

2. Fixed an issue in the console version of the Windows TurboVNC Viewer (cvncviewer.exe) whereby the console output of the viewer could not be redirected to a file.

3. The Java/Mac/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer now includes an option for reversing the direction of mouse scroll wheel events that are sent to the VNC server. This is useful when connecting from clients that have "natural scrolling" enabled.

4. Fixed an issue whereby, under certain rare circumstances (for instance, if the Xvnc binary was setuid root), the TurboVNC Server would allow any user of the system (not just the session owner) to authenticate with a TurboVNC session using PAM User/Password Authentication, if the user ACL feature was disabled.

5. Fixed a BadMatch X11 error that occurred when attempting to resize the TurboVNC Server desktop to a smaller size using the X RandR 1.2 API (for instance, by executing xrandr --output TurboVNC --mode {new_mode}.)

6. Fixed an issue whereby the TurboVNC Server could not be built using GnuTLS 3.4.0 or later.

7. Improved the TLS encryption feature in the following ways:

   • The anonymous Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange algorithm is now supported when the TurboVNC Server is built using GnuTLS 3.0.0 and later. (The Java/Mac/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer already supports ECDH.)
   • The TurboVNC Server will now use the most recent version of the TLS protocol that both the server and the viewer support.
   • The "VNC connection info" dialog in the Java/Mac/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer will now display the TLS protocol version currently in use.
   • The TurboVNC Server can now be built with OpenSSL 1.1, and if it is built with TVNC_DLOPENSSL=1 (the default), it can use OpenSSL 1.1 at run time regardless of whether it was built on a machine that has OpenSSL 1.1 installed.
   • When using OpenSSL, the TurboVNC Server will now log a more meaningful error message if the TLS handshake fails.

8. Fixed an issue in the Mac (Java) TurboVNC Viewer whereby the initial non-full-screen window was positioned incorrectly if it spanned multiple screens.

9. Fixed an issue in the Windows (native) TurboVNC Viewer whereby multi-screen spanning did not work at all if the secondary display was to the left of the primary display.

10. Multi-screen spanning now works with the Linux/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer in full-screen mode, if the viewer is using the TurboVNC Helper library. (Due to limitations in X11, it is still not possible to use multi-screen spanning with the Linux/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer in windowed mode.) Also, the Linux/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer now falls back to Java's built-in full-screen window feature, thus allowing full-screen mode to work with single-screen (Primary) spanning even if the TurboVNC Helper library is not available.

11. The TurboVNC Server will now clamp the desktop dimensions to 32767x32767 regardless of the max-desktop-size setting in the security configuration file. This prevents two issues:

    • The server would fail to send framebuffer updates and would continuously log messages of the form "WARNING: Framebuffer update at 0,0 with dimensions 0x0 has been clipped to the screen boundaries" if the desktop width or height was set, by way of the -geometry command-line argument or a remote desktop resize request, to a value greater than 32767.
    • The server would segfault if a mode with a width or height greater than 32767 was configured and enabled using the X RandR extension.

    Although TurboVNC can handle framebuffer dimensions larger than this, the underlying X.org screen structure uses a signed short to represent width and height, and thus values larger than 32767 overflow the data type and can sometimes be interpreted as negative numbers.

12. Closed a loophole that allowed users to use X RandR functions to make the desktop larger than the dimensions allowed by the max-desktop-size setting in the security configuration file.

13. When automatic desktop resizing and automatic spanning are both enabled, the TurboVNC Viewer will now use single-screen spanning ("Primary monitor only") when in windowed mode and multi-screen spanning ("All monitors") when in full-screen mode.

14. Fixed an issue whereby the Java TurboVNC Viewer, when launched from the vncviewer-java.bat script, the Start Menu shortcut, or Java Web Start on Windows clients with a 32-bit JRE, would fail with "Error: missing 'server' JVM". On Windows, the 32-bit JRE only provides the client VM, and the 64-bit JRE only provides the server VM, so specifying -server in the launch scripts was unnecessary.

15. Worked around an issue whereby, when the TurboVNC Viewer was running on macOS 10.12 "Sierra", pressing and holding certain keys would cause the viewer to stop processing subsequent keystrokes if ApplePressAndHoldEnabled was set to true in the macOS user defaults (which it is by default in recent macOS releases.) It is still necessary to set ApplePressAndHoldEnabled to false, either in the global domain or the com.turbovnc.vncviewer.VncViewer domain, in order for key repeat to work with the TurboVNC Viewer.

16. The Java/Mac/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer now supports the user and noremotecursor directives in .vnc connection info files.

17. Fixed an issue that prevented the keyboard grabbing feature from working properly in the Java TurboVNC Viewer on 32-bit Windows systems.

18. Fixed an issue whereby, when server-side cursor rendering was enabled, the cursor would flicker on and off as the mouse was dragged.

19. Fixed an issue whereby the Java/Mac/Un*x TurboVNC Viewer would, under certain circumstances (specifically, when receiving a desktop size update from the server with automatic desktop resizing enabled, toggling on/off the toolbar, or changing the scaling settings), always behave as if the CurrentMonitorIsPrimary parameter was disabled.

20. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now allows the window manager startup script/executable to be specified using an environment variable (TVNC_WM.) This facilitates using a different window manager for local and remote desktop sessions on the same machine, or temporarily switching the window manager used by TurboVNC.

21. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now sets the XDG_SESSION_TYPE environment variable to x11. This is necessary when running GNOME 3 on Fedora 25 and later. Otherwise, GNOME 3 will assume it is operating in a Wayland environment.

22. Worked around an issue whereby desktop resizing in the TurboVNC Server would fail on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (and likely on Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04 as well, although those releases are EOL as of this writing) due to Ubuntu's inclusion of an experimental extension to the XFixes protocol that was never accepted upstream in X.org.

23. Fixed a bug in the X.org code that prevented the TurboVNC Server from working properly on little endian PowerPC systems.

24. Fixed a couple of issues in the TurboVNC Server that prevented cursors from being rendered and transmitted properly if the server was running on a big endian system.

25. Fixed an issue in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer whereby, if keyboard grabbing was disabled, using Alt-Tab to select another window would sometimes leave the Alt key in a pressed state on the server. Fixed a similar issue in the Mac TurboVNC Viewer whereby, when quitting the viewer using Command-Q or closing the connection using Command-W, the Super/Windows key would be left in a pressed state on the server.

26. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby the client clipboard contents would not be transferred to the server if text was selected in the VNC session and the middle mouse button was clicked in the viewer window without first bringing the window to the foreground.

27. Improved the zero-install Java Web Start feature in the following ways:

    • The built-in HTTP server in the TurboVNC Server now sends the "Content-Length" and "Last-Modified" HTTP headers. These headers are used by Java Web Start to determine whether the server's copy of the TurboVNC Viewer JAR is newer than the client's copy, and the addition of the headers prevents an issue whereby Java Web Start would never update the cached copy of the TurboVNC Viewer JAR on the client.
    • The JNLP file generated by the TurboVNC Server now contains directives that disable background updating of the TurboVNC Viewer JAR. Under certain circumstances, background updating was causing the TurboVNC Server to become unresponsive, since it is running the VNC, X11, and HTTP servers in the same thread.

28. Worked around an issue in OS X whereby the TurboVNC Viewer window would not be brought to the foreground if a mouse button other than the primary button was clicked in it. Because OS X sends only mouse press events to non-foreground windows, this issue was causing mouse buttons other than the primary button to become stuck in the pressed state on the server if one of those buttons was clicked in the viewer window while the window was in the background.

29. Fixed an issue in the TurboVNC Server whereby it would hang and eventually time out when attempting to negotiate VeNCrypt capabilities with the viewer. This issue was known to affect only Solaris 11 hosts, but it might have also affected other platforms under rare circumstances.

30. Worked around an issue in Java that caused Control-Underscore (the keyboard shortcut for the Undo command in Emacs) to be transmitted incorrectly when using the Java TurboVNC Viewer. Worked around another issue in Java that caused AltGr symbols associated with a dead key (for instance, the '|' symbol on Danish keyboards) to be transmitted incorrectly.

2.1.1

Significant changes relative to 2.1:

1. Fixed an XML error ("The processing instruction target matching '[xX][mM][lL]' is not allowed" or "Could not parse launch file") that occurred when attempting to launch the Java TurboVNC Viewer using the built-in zero-install Java Web Start feature in the TurboVNC Server. Apparently recent releases of Java did not like the fact that the JNLP file generated by the TurboVNC Server began with an XML comment.

2. Arguments to the vncserver script are now case-insensitive.

3. The TurboVNC Server init.d script was erroneously checking for the existence of ~/.vnc/passwd, even if the permitted and selected security types did not require a VNC password file. The init.d script now invokes vncserver with a new argument (-quiet) that causes vncserver to fail if a VNC password file is required but does not exist.

4. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now supports the rfbTLS security descriptor used by Vino. This should allow the viewer to connect to encrypted Vino sessions using either the TLSVnc or TLSNone security types.

5. The default behavior of the TurboVNC Server is to refuse new non-shared connections if a viewer is already connected. Previously, the server accomplished this by hard-coding the -dontdisconnect argument to Xvnc inside of the vncserver wrapper script. This release of TurboVNC instead makes -dontdisconnect the default in Xvnc and introduces a new Xvnc argument (-disconnect) to reverse the behavior. This new option allows TurboVNC to mimic the behavior of other VNC implementations that disconnect existing viewers when a new non-shared connection is established.

6. Added a new parameter to the Java TurboVNC Viewer (LocalCursor) that, when enabled, causes cursor shape updates to be ignored and the local cursor to always be displayed. This mimics the behavior of the Windows TurboVNC Viewer when "Local cursor shape" is set to "Normal arrow" and "Mouse cursor" is set to "Don't show remote cursor". This option is useful when connecting to broken VNC server implementations that do not properly support server-side cursor rendering or cursor shape updates.

7. Fixed an issue in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer whereby the mouse scroll wheel would stop working if the viewer was moved to a monitor above or to the left of the Windows "main"/"primary" display.

8. Fixed an issue whereby zero-height PutImage requests (issued by XCB) would crash the TurboVNC X server. This was known to affect certain Qt5 applications running under Debian Stretch but may have also affected other applications and platforms.

2.1

Significant changes relative to 2.1 beta2:

1. Added a new parameter to the Java TurboVNC Viewer (LocalUsernameLC) that, when enabled along with the SendLocalUsername parameter, will cause the local user name to be sent to the server in lowercase. This can be useful for Windows clients, since Windows allows mixed-case user names but Un*x machines generally don't.

2. Fixed a regression introduced in 2.0 beta1[1] whereby connecting to the TurboVNC Server with cursor shape updates (client-side cursor rendering) enabled and continuous updates disabled (or with a viewer, such as the TurboVNC 1.1 Viewer, that doesn't support continuous updates) would cause the server and viewer to get into an infinite ping-pong loop whenever the cursor shape changed. This infinite loop caused TurboVNC to consume an inordinate amount of CPU and network resources until the next non-cursor-related framebuffer update was sent.

3. Fixed several serious visual artifacts with server-side cursor rendering (regression introduced in 2.0 beta1[1].) Server-side cursor rendering is not generally the default in TurboVNC, but it is useful for collaboration purposes.

4. Fixed an issue whereby the TurboVNC Server would become unresponsive to input if a viewer connected while the MATE screensaver was active.

5. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now includes a workaround for a bug in GNOME 3 whereby the pointer disappears when mousing over the top bar.

6. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, when the remote desktop size was changed in the Options dialog, the new desktop size request was not sent to the server until the next framebuffer update was received.

7. Fixed an issue in the TurboVNC Server's implementation of the X RANDR extension that was causing viewer-initiated remote desktop resizes to fail or otherwise behave incorrectly with GNOME 3.

8. The TurboVNC Server now ignores remote desktop resize requests from viewers that authenticated with view-only credentials.

9. Fixed a regression introduced by 2.1 beta1[2] (but, for reasons unexplained, not exposed until 2.1 beta1[4]) whereby the TurboVNC Server, when built without TLS encryption, would sometimes segfault when a viewer disconnected. Oddly, this was not reproducible except on older platforms, such as RHEL 4.

10. Fixed a regression introduced in 2.1 beta1[2] whereby the TurboVNC Server, when built without TLS encryption, would fail to launch via the vncserver script and display the following error: Unrecognized option: -x509cert.

11. Fixed an issue with the TurboVNC Server's 3D window manager feature that was known to affect Red Hat- and Ubuntu-compatible systems (and may have affected others as well.) When running vncserver with the -3dwm option, the window manager would behave as if VirtualGL was not active (thus causing the WM to crash, if it required OpenGL.) The underlying cause of this was code executed from within /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc that launches the WM using ssh-agent if the SSH_AGENT_PID (Red Hat) or SSH_AUTH_SOCK (Ubuntu) environment variable is unset. ssh-agent clobbers the LD_PRELOAD environment variable, so in order to make it work properly with VirtualGL, vglrun has to be launched by ssh-agent, not vice versa.

    The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now launches the window manager in VirtualGL and launches VirtualGL in ssh-agent if 3D window manager support is enabled and there is no existing ssh-agent session. Furthermore, the -3dwm option to vncserver now simply sets the TVNC_3DWM environment variable to 1 rather than invoking VirtualGL directly. The default xstartup.turbovnc script launches the WM in VirtualGL if that environment variable is set, using a second environment variable (TVNC_VGLRUN, which can be overridden by the user) to specify the VirtualGL command line. However, users can craft their own xstartup.turbovnc scripts that handle the TVNC_3DWM environment variable differently, if desired.

12. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates will now properly launch the GNOME Flashback (Metacity) window manager on Ubuntu 16.04, if 3D window manager support is not activated. This eliminates the need to install MATE on that platform.

13. The default xtartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now contains a fix for an issue whereby Unity 7.2 on Ubuntu 14 would automatically disable the compiz OpenGL plugin if the window manager was launched in a broken OpenGL environment (such as if the user forgot to specify -3dwm.) Symptomatically, this issue caused the menus and launcher to disappear, leaving only a blank desktop. When launching Unity, the xstartup.turbovnc script now attempts to create an environment similar to the one created by GDM or LightDM.

    This fix also allows Unity 7.4 under Ubuntu 16.04 to run in TurboVNC, if 3D window manager support is enabled.

14. The "OracleJava" TurboVNC package is now the default Mac package, since Oracle Java performs much better than Apple's (deprecated) Java distribution on OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" and later. Hence, the "OracleJava" suffix has been removed from that package. The "AppleJava" TurboVNC package is still provided, but it should only be used on OS X 10.9 and earlier.

15. Fixed a regression introduced in 2.1 beta1[2] whereby Xvnc would segfault if the -rfbauth argument was not specified and a viewer attempted to authenticate using a VNC password.

16. Dead keys should now fully work when using Java 8 or later on Windows and OS X. They still do not work properly when using Java 6 or Linux, due to bugs in Java.

17. Fixed two issues in the TurboVNC Viewer related to keyboard handling:

    • An issue whereby, when pressing Shift or AltGr, then pressing a "printable" (alphanumeric or symbol) key, then releasing the keys in the same order, the viewer would compute and send a different key symbol for the release event than it did for the press event (because the key was no longer modified.) This would confuse the XKEYBOARD handler in the server, which would ignore the release event, thus causing the printable key to appear pressed from the point of view of applications running in the TurboVNC session.
    • An issue whereby, when a key was pressed, the viewer window lost focus, then the key was released in another window, the key would similarly continue to appear pressed from the point of view of applications running in the TurboVNC session.

18. Fixed a regression in the standalone Linux TurboVNC Viewer caused by 2.1 beta1[4] (remote X Input support) whereby some X Input devices other than extended pointer devices (such as keyboards, regular mice, and webcams) were mistakenly being cloned onto the TurboVNC Server, thus causing erratic pointer behavior and other issues. Some devices (even some keyboards) seem to report that they are extended pointer devices when in fact they aren't. The TurboVNC Helper is now more discriminating and does not allow any X Input device whose type Atom is "MOUSE" or "KEYBOARD", or any device with relative valuators, to be cloned onto the server. The server now also rejects any attempt by the viewer to create an extended input device with relative valuators, since those don't currently work. Wacom tablets and other extended pointer devices with absolute valuators should still work fine.

19. Worked around an issue in Java that was causing scrollbars to be unnecessarily displayed in the Linux/Java TurboVNC Viewer when it was used under GNOME 3 with automatic desktop resizing enabled.

20. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer will now pass keystrokes from Microsoft extended keys to the VNC server when the keyboard is grabbed.

21. Fixed a regression introduced in 2.1 beta1[9] whereby the Linux TurboVNC Viewer and the Windows Java TurboVNC Viewer would throw a NullPointerException if the options were changed in the Options dialog prior to connecting to a VNC server. This issue occurred only in the standalone viewers, not when using Java Web Start.

2.0.91 (2.1 beta2)

Significant changes relative to 2.1 beta1:

1. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, when built against libjpeg-turbo 1.5 or later, it would generate the following error: Class not found: org/libjpegturbo/turbojpeg/TJException at run time and subsequently fail to accelerate JPEG decompression. TJException is a new class in libjpeg-turbo 1.5, and due to an oversight, VncViewer.jar was not including it.

2.0.90 (2.1 beta1)

Significant changes relative to 2.0.2:

1. The TurboVNC Server can now emulate a subset of the NV-CONTROL X11 extension, in order to support certain 3D applications that rely on this extension to query and set low-level nVidia GPU attributes. See the User's Guide for more details.

2. The TurboVNC Server now provides full support for the VeNCrypt RFB extensions, including TLS-encrypted security types. TLS encryption is provided by OpenSSL in the official TurboVNC binaries, but GnuTLS can be used instead when building the TurboVNC Server from source. Note that when using the Java TurboVNC Viewer, you must use 2.0.1 or later when connecting to a TurboVNC 2.1 server. Older versions of the Java TurboVNC Viewer had a bug that caused them to lock up when connecting to a server that supports both the Tight and VeNCrypt security extensions.

   Backward compatibility note: because of the addition of this feature, it was necessary to remove the -noauth, -novncauth, -nootp, and -nopam parameters to vncserver, because these parameters could not be emulated exactly using the new VeNCrypt security type selection mechanism. Please use the new -securitytypes parameter instead (see the Xvnc man page for more details.)

3. TurboVNC's vncserver script now supports the -autokill option from TigerVNC, which causes the server to be killed automatically whenever the startup script finishes (which will usually happen as the result of logging out of the window manager running in the TurboVNC session.) It was possible to accomplish the same thing in earlier versions of TurboVNC by running /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver -fg </dev/null &, but this is more intuitive.

4. The TurboVNC Server and the Java TurboVNC Viewer (when the latter is run in standalone mode on Un*x/Linux machines, using the TurboVNC Helper library) now support a remote X Input interface whereby extended pointer devices (such as drawing tablets) on the client are cloned in the TurboVNC session, and the events from these devices (including pressure, tilt, etc.) are passed from viewer to server. This was specifically designed for Wacom tablets but should work with other extended pointer devices as well.

   Additionally, the Windows TurboVNC Viewer provides specific support for Wacom drawing tablets by interfacing between the Wacom drivers for Windows and the afore-mentioned remote X Input interface.

5. Keyboard grabbing has been implemented in the Java TurboVNC Viewer for Windows, thus allowing special keystrokes (such as Alt-Tab) to be sent to the server.

6. Added a new option to Xvnc (-pamsession) that will open a PAM session for every viewer that authenticates using the username/password of the user who owns the TurboVNC session and will leave that PAM session open until the viewer disconnects. This feature was specifically implemented in order to allow Kerberos tickets created by PAM to be reused within the TurboVNC session, but the feature may benefit other use cases as well.

7. Added a new parameter to the Java TurboVNC Viewer (NoReconnect) that can optionally be used to revert the behavior introduced in 2.0 beta1[17].

8. The controls in the Options dialog of the Windows (native) TurboVNC Viewer have been re-organized into two tabs ("Encoding" and "Connection"), which makes the layout of that dialog more similar to that of the Java viewer's Options dialog.

9. The keyboard/pointer grabbing feature can now be configured from the Options Dialog in both the Windows and Java TurboVNC Viewers.

10. Added a -poll option to tvncconfig, which works identically to the -poll option in RealVNC's (and TigerVNC's) vncconfig program. This causes tvncconfig to poll for changes to the clipboard at a specified interval rather than waiting for the X server to inform it of the changes.

11. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer package now includes a console version of the viewer (cvncviewer.exe), which is useful when debugging or when using the -via and -tunnel options. This version of the viewer is built by default when building TurboVNC on Windows, but it can be disabled by setting the TVNC_WINCONSOLE CMake variable to 0.

2.0.2

Significant changes relative to 2.0.1:

1. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates now includes unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS. This fixes an issue whereby starting the TurboVNC Server from within an existing GNOME 2 (verified with GNOME 2.28.x and later) or MATE session would cause the GNOME/MATE session running in TurboVNC to fail with an error dialog: "Could not acquire name on session bus".

2. Fixed an issue whereby the TurboVNC Server would not properly handle Caps Lock when using the TurboVNC Viewer on OS X. X11 generates both a key press and a key release event when Caps Lock is toggled, but OS X generates a key press when Caps Lock is toggled on and a key release when it is toggled off. This was causing the Caps Lock state to become decoupled between client and server. The solution was to do what TigerVNC does and ignore Caps Lock (and other lock modifiers) on the server side, thus allowing the client to handle Caps Lock. If for some reason this causes problems, then the old behavior can be recovered by setting the TVNC_XKBIGNORELOCK environment variable to 0 prior to launching the TurboVNC Server.

3. Worked around an issue whereby the Java TurboVNC Viewer on Windows, when running under Java 7 and later, would take an inordinate amount of time to create the viewer window after connecting to a VNC server. This slowdown was due to a slow Win32 system call-- DescribePixelFormat()-- which is used in the implementation of GraphicsDevice.getConfigurations() in Windows JVMs. This system call also forces the DirectDraw DLL to be loaded, which is unnecessary (TurboVNC explicitly disables DirectDraw blitting for performance reasons.)

   The Java TurboVNC Viewer now automatically sets the sun.awt.nopixfmt system property to true, which should significantly speed up the creation of the viewer window, particularly on multi-screen clients, by avoiding the slow DescribePixelFormat() system call. This causes Java 2D to always use the default pixel format for the display, but since the TurboVNC Viewer will always try to use GDI blitting (as opposed to OpenGL or DirectDraw blitting), the default pixel format should always work. If for some reason it doesn't, however, then the old behavior of the Java TurboVNC Viewer can be restored by passing -Dsun.awt.nopixfmt=0 to java or adding -Dsun.awt.nopixfmt=0 to the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS environment variable.

4. "Dead" keys, which are used to add accents and other diacritics to subsequent alphabetic keystrokes, should now work properly when using the Windows TurboVNC Viewer. Additionally, certain AltGr-modified symbols (such as the Euro sign on European keyboards) did not previously work with the Windows TurboVNC Viewer. That has been fixed.

   Furthermore, dead keys should now mostly work when using the Java TurboVNC Viewer on Windows under Java 8 and later. Due to irregularities in how Java translates dead keys into events on other platforms (for instance, on OS X, Java uses a different key code for the press and release events of a particular dead key, and on Linux, Java only communicates release events for dead keys), dead key support on non-Windows platforms is still incomplete.

5. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby the Options, Clipboard, and Profiling dialogs were not centered relative to the viewer window.

6. Fixed an issue in the TurboVNC Server (Xvnc) whereby, when running a compositing window manager such as Gnome 3, activity in off-screen windows (such as a scrolling xterm being displayed in a separate workspace) could interfere with the display of on-screen windows that occupied the same screen area as the off-screen windows.

7. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer will now resolve localhost to the IPv4 loopback address (127.0.0.1) by default unless the /ipv6 option is specified. This makes its behavior more consistent with the Java viewer (NOTE: connecting to localhost on a Windows machine is an unusual case, but it can occur when using virtualization software that has a built-in VNC server.)

8. Improved the parsing of display names in both TurboVNC viewers. In particular, the Windows viewer now properly parses the following display name forms:

   • :n (same as localhost:n)
   • ::port (same as localhost::port)
   • x:x:x::x:n (abbreviated IPv6 address)
   • x:x:x::x::port (abbreviated IPv6 address)
   • x:x:x:x:x:x:x:x:n (full IPv6 address)
   • [IPv6]:n (IPv6 address in brackets)
   • [IPv6]::port (IPv6 address in brackets)

   Both viewers now properly parse the following display name forms:

   • x:x:x::x (abbreviated IPv6 address, same as x:x:x::x:0)
   • [IPv6] (IPv6 address in brackets, same as [IPv6]:0)

9. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer should now build with Visual C++ 2015.

10. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby the viewer, when using the "server" (manual) remote desktop resizing mode, would unnecessarily display two scrollbars if one of the remote desktop dimensions was too large for the local display but the other dimension wasn't.

2.0.1

Significant changes relative to 2.0:

1. When using an external SSH client with the Via or Tunnel parameters, the Java TurboVNC Viewer was not passing the SSH user name to the external SSH client, which caused SSH authentication to fail unless the remote and local user names were the same. This has been fixed.

2. Fixed an issue whereby the TurboVNC X server was erroneously generating X11 MotionNotify events every time a mouse button was pressed or released, regardless of whether the pointer had actually moved. This caused problems with certain applications (for instance, in GNOME Terminal, text was selected when single-clicking on it rather than double-clicking or click-dragging on it.)

3. The /desktopsize server option now works properly with the Windows TurboVNC Viewer.

4. Fixed an issue that prevented VeNCrypt authentication from working in the Java TurboVNC Viewer when connecting to a server that supports both the TightVNC and VeNCrypt security extensions.

5. Improved the GUI for specifying the X.509 CA certificate and CRL in the Java viewer, and added new command-line/applet parameters (X509CA and X509CRL) that can be used to specify these files without using the GUI.

6. The Java viewer will now report an error if one of the security types specified in the SecurityTypes parameter is invalid. This prevents hard-to-diagnose issues (such as authentication errors or the wrong security type being selected) if one of the security types is misspelled.

7. The TightVNC/TurboVNC-specific "Unix Login" authentication scheme can now be enabled/disabled by using the Java TurboVNC Viewer's SecurityTypes parameter, similarly to other authentication schemes and VeNCrypt security types. Furthermore, the NoUnixLogin parameter now disables the VeNCrypt *Plain security types as well as the Unix Login security type, and the User and SendLocalUserName parameters now disable any of the VeNCrypt security types that don't require a user name.

8. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now supports (and prefers) elliptic curve ciphers when using the Anonymous TLS security types. Additionally, the Java TurboVNC Viewer now uses TLS v1.1+ by default instead of TLS v1.0.

9. Improvements to the handling of X.509 certificates in the Java TurboVNC Viewer:

   • Fixed a NullPointerException that would occur when attempting to use one of the X.509 security types without specifying an X.509 certificate authority (CA) certificate.
   • If the server's certificate is signed by an unknown CA, then the viewer will pop up a dialog that gives the user the option to trust the certificate for future connections.
   • The viewer can now handle X.509 certificate files containing multiple concatenated certificates.
   • The viewer now performs hostname verification using either the X.509 v3 subjectAltName (SAN) extension or, if SAN is not present, the subject CN field.

10. When entering full-screen mode or using the "Default Window Size/Position" feature in the TurboVNC Viewer (both Java and Windows), the viewer will now use the monitor containing the largest number of pixels from the viewer window as the "primary" monitor, for the purposes of spanning. Thus, if the viewer window is mostly contained on a monitor other than the left/top one, entering full-screen mode or setting the window to the default size/position will no longer cause the window to jump to the left/top monitor.

    OS X Yosemite introduced an optional feature (enabled by default) called "Spaces", whereby each monitor occupies its own independent space when in full-screen mode (thus allowing full-screen mode to be enabled independently on each monitor.) Previously, when this feature was enabled, moving the TurboVNC Viewer window to a monitor other than the left/top one and entering full-screen mode would result in a black screen. This bug fix allows Primary spanning to work properly with Spaces, but note that no other spanning mode will work properly unless the Spaces feature is disabled.

    Both viewers contain a new command-line option/parameter (-firstmonitorisprimary for the Windows viewer, CurrentMonitorIsPrimary=0 for the Java viewer) that allows the previous behavior (always treating the left/top monitor as the primary) to be restored.

11. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now supports the BGR555 pixel format, which is reported to be necessary when connecting to some embedded devices.

12. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now encodes the clipboard as ISO-8859-1 when sending it to the server, instead of UTF-8. The RFB spec requires that the clipboard be encoded as ISO-8859-1, so it is possible that attempting to encode it as UTF-8 was causing problems with certain applications.

13. The TurboVNC Server now allows the maximum clipboard transfer size to be specified, by way of a new Xvnc argument (-maxclipboard). Previously the limit was hard-coded to 1 MB. Furthermore, the TurboVNC Server now truncates clipboard updates larger than the max. clipboard size instead of ignoring them.

14. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now allows the maximum clipboard transfer size to be specified, by way of a new parameter (MaxClipboard). The Java TurboVNC Viewer now also truncates any clipboard transfers greater than MaxClipboard (which is set to 1 MB by default.) This prevents the viewer from sending clipboard data to the server that will ultimately be discarded.

2.0

Significant changes relative to 2.0 beta1:

1. A new security configuration file directive (no-httpd) has been introduced in order to disable the built-in HTTP server in the TurboVNC Server on a system-wide basis.

2. A new security configuration file directive (no-x11-tcp-connections) has been introduced in order to disable X11 TCP connections to the TurboVNC Server on a system-wide basis. This is the equivalent of passing -nolisten tcp to every instance of the TurboVNC X server running on a particular host.

3. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now supports the grabkeyboard, resizemode, desktopwidth, and desktopheight directives in .vnc connection info files. These directives were added to the Windows TurboVNC Viewer in 2.0 beta but were left out of the Java viewer due to an oversight.

4. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates will now launch the MATE desktop on Ubuntu 15, if it is installed and if 3D window manager support is not activated. The GNOME Flashback session under Ubuntu 15 cannot be made to work properly with TurboVNC, for unknown reasons, but MATE is a better solution anyhow.

5. The drawing performance of the Java TurboVNC Viewer when running under Oracle Java 7 and later on OS X has been dramatically improved (by 3-7x for 2D application workloads and 35-50% for 3D application workloads.) When running the standalone TurboVNC Viewer, Apple Java will probably still perform better on Macs running OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" and earlier, but on Macs running OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" and later, Oracle Java is now the fastest solution (Java 2D is apparently not accelerated in Apple Java 6 on these more recent OS X releases.) See the User's Guide for more details.

6. Fixed an issue whereby pressing any of the extra buttons on mice with more than 3 buttons (Microsoft calls these "X buttons") would cause the Java TurboVNC Viewer to send a left button press event to the TurboVNC Server without sending a corresponding button release event. The Java TurboVNC Viewer now ignores any X button events, since X11 doesn't support them.

1.2.90 (2.0 beta1)

Significant changes relative to 1.2.3:

1. The TurboVNC X server has been completely overhauled and is now based on the unmodified Xorg 7.7 code base. This overhaul enables support for the X extensions needed by newer window managers (RANDR 1.2, Composite, XFIXES, Damage, etc.) In addition, the keyboard handler has been completely overhauled and now uses the XKEYBOARD extension. This fixes key mapping issues that occurred when running TurboVNC with certain versions of GNOME (previously, it was necessary to set an environment variable in xstartup.turbovnc to work around those issues.)

2. Added the ability to dynamically resize the remote desktop, either through the X RANDR extension on the server or remotely from a VNC viewer that supports the RFB desktop size extensions. Both TurboVNC viewers now also include an "automatic desktop resize" feature that will resize the remote desktop so that it always fits exactly in the viewer window without using scrollbars. A new max-desktop-size directive is provided in the TurboVNC security configuration file in order to allow a maximum desktop size to be specified for all TurboVNC sessions on a given host.

3. The X11 TurboVNC Viewer has been retired and replaced with the Java TurboVNC Viewer. The X11 viewer will continue to be maintained in the 1.2.x branch on a break/fix basis only. The Java viewer provides similar performance to the X11 viewer when remotely displaying 3D application workloads to a reasonably modern client machine.

4. The Java TurboVNC Viewer, when run as an applet, can now be displayed to an embedded frame in a web page rather than a dedicated window. This restores a feature of the TurboVNC 1.1 Java viewer that was lost in 1.2. Full-screen mode and scaling do not work when the viewer is run as an embedded applet.

5. vncconnect now uses the VNC X extension to establish a reverse connection, rather than setting a root window property on the VNC X server. This makes TurboVNC's implementation of vncconnect compatible with RealVNC and TigerVNC servers, and the return status of vncconnect now reflects whether the reverse connection was successfully made. vncconnect also now has a -disconnect option, which can be used to disconnect all listening viewers.

6. Since Apple is discontinuing their distribution of Java in favor of Oracle's (which doesn't work on Snow Leopard and earlier), we now provide two Mac packages-- one that works with Leopard and later and uses Apple's version of Java, and one that works with Lion and later and uses the Oracle Java plug-in.

7. When running in listen mode, the Java TurboVNC Viewer now displays a tray icon with a popup menu similar to that of the Windows native viewer. This allows the listener to be shut down, for global options to be set for all connections, and for new forward connections to be made without using the command line or launching another viewer instance.

8. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates will now properly launch the GNOME fallback window manager on Ubuntu 14.04, if 3D window manager support is not activated.

9. Interframe comparison and Compression Level 2 can now be selected in the TurboVNC Viewer GUI. Also, a new command-line option/parameter (CompatibleGUI) can now be used to force the GUI to expose all 10 compression levels (useful when connecting to non-TurboVNC servers.)

10. The Interframe Comparison Engine (ICE) now compares large framebuffer update rectangles on a block-by-block basis, which prevents the entire rectangle from being sent if only a small portion of it has changed. The default block size is 256x256 but can be changed using the TVNC_ICEBLOCKSIZE environment variable (for instance, TVNC_ICEBLOCKSIZE=128 would use 128x128 blocks.)

11. By default, the embedded HTTP server in the TurboVNC Server will now serve up a JNLP (Java Web Start) file for the session instead of an applet. You can add /applet to the URL to instruct the HTTP server to serve up an applet instead. The official TurboVNC packages for Linux also include the native JAR files necessary to deliver the libjpeg-turbo JNI library to Windows, Linux, and OS X clients (when using Java Web Start.)

12. vncconnect can now be used to connect a TurboVNC session to an instance of the UltraVNC Repeater in Mode II.

13. The Via and Tunnel parameters in the Java TurboVNC Viewer (which allow specifying an SSH or UltraVNC Repeater gateway through which the VNC connection should be tunneled) can now be configured using the Options dialog.

14. On Un*x/X11 platforms, a small JNI library (turbovnchelper) is now deployed alongside the Java TurboVNC Viewer in order to work around full-screen mode deficiencies in Java (specifically, under certain window managers, the taskbars would appear on top of the full-screen window.) Because the turbovnchelper library depends on libjawt.so, it is unfortunately not easy to deploy it using Java Web Start, so it is currently only used when the viewer is launched as a standalone application (using the vncviewer script.)

15. The NoNewConn parameter in the Java TurboVNC Viewer will now disable the "Close Connection" option in the F8 menu and the "Disconnect" button in the toolbar as well (useful for web portals, particularly when using the new embedded applet mode.)

16. On Un*x/X11 platforms, the Java TurboVNC Viewer can now grab the keyboard when run as a standalone application. This allows special key sequences, such as Alt-Tab, to be sent to the server. The pointer can also be optionally grabbed, which allows special keyboard + pointer sequences (such as Alt-{drag}), to be sent to the server as well. This feature requires the afore-mentioned TurboVNC Helper library.

17. The Java TurboVNC Viewer will now offer an option to reconnect if the connection fails for any reason.

18. The Windows native TurboVNC Viewer no longer exposes the Double Buffering option in its Options dialog. The option was removed mainly to make room for the Desktop Size combo box, but also, single buffering is rarely used and is mostly a legacy feature. Double buffering can still be disabled via the /singlebuffer command-line switch or by specifying doublebuffer=0 in a VNC connection file.

19. /etc/turbovncserver-auth.conf (the "authentication configuration file") has been renamed to /etc/turbovncserver-security.conf (the "security configuration file") to reflect the fact that it allows configuration of more than just authentication methods.

1.2.3

Significant changes relative to 1.2.2:

1. Fixed an issue whereby the Java TurboVNC Viewer would not enable the OS X Lion full-screen mode feature on OS X 10.10 "Yosemite".

2. Fixed a regression introduced in 1.2.2 that caused a non-fatal NullPointerException in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whenever the scaling factor was changed in the options dialog.

3. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby the toolbar would sometimes appear all black or be overwritten by the initial framebuffer update when running under Java 7 and later.

4. Fixed an issue whereby the Java TurboVNC Viewer would unnecessarily add scrollbars to the viewer window if the remote desktop was exactly large enough to fit in the window without using scrollbars.

5. Fixed an issue whereby the /grabkeyboard, /scale, and /span command-line parameters to the Windows TurboVNC Viewer could not be specified in uppercase.

6. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer now supports scaling factors > 200.

7. Java 7 and later on Mac platforms no longer include a hardware-accelerated 2D blitter for Java 2D, opting instead to use only OpenGL for image drawing. When using the default pixel format (BGRX), this is incredibly slow on some Macs, because the OpenGL blitter is having to set all of the alpha values to 255 (opaque.) Thus, the Java TurboVNC Viewer will now automatically use an alpha-enabled pixel format (BGRA) for its back buffer if it detects that it is running on a Mac with Java 7 or later (which will generally be the case when the viewer is deployed as an applet or using Java Web Start.) This improves drawing performance by as much as 4-5x on certain Mac models, although the drawing performance with Apple Java 6 is still going to be faster than with Java 7 or later. The Java TurboVNC Viewer will also now automatically use an alpha-enabled pixel format on non-Mac platforms if it detects that OpenGL Java 2D blitting is being selected (normally accomplished by setting the sun.java2d.opengl system property to true.)

   The turbovnc.forcealpha Java system property can be used to override the default behavior described above (refer to User's Guide.)

8. Normally, Java 2D uses Direct3D by default for blitting (image drawing) on Windows platforms, but GDI blitting is almost always faster (sometimes much faster.) Thus, the Java TurboVNC Viewer now attempts to disable Direct3D blitting on Windows unless it is specifically requested (which can be accomplished by setting the sun.java2d.d3d system property to true.) Because Direct3D blitting can't be disabled programmatically under Java 6 and earlier, the vncviewer-java.bat script and the Windows start menu shortcut now pass -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false to java to ensure that Direct3D blitting is always disabled when the Java TurboVNC Viewer is run as a standalone application.

9. Improved the Tight decoding performance in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer by 5-15%.

10. Since the Java TurboVNC Viewer already has its own double buffering mechanism, it now disables double buffering in Java 2D. The primary advantage of this is that MIT-SHM pixmap support is no longer required on Un*x platforms in order to achieve optimal performance. This also makes the viewer faster on some systems. On Windows, the Java viewer is now as fast as or faster than the native viewer as a result of this change and [8]. You can set the turbovnc.swingdb system property to true to restore the old behavior.

11. Fixed multiple issues in the Java TurboVNC Viewer related to full-screen mode and desktop resizing and the interaction thereof.

    • When in full-screen mode, the viewer would sometimes abort with "Destination buffer is not large enough" if the remote desktop size was increased.
    • When in full-screen mode, the viewer would sometimes exit full-screen mode without re-entering it if the remote desktop size was changed. This was particularly known to be a problem when using full-screen mode on OS X 10.7 or later.
    • Fixed a couple of other timing-related issues (race conditions) that could sometimes occur when resizing the window or entering/exiting full-screen mode. These issues would cause non-fatal exceptions or other unexpected behavior.
    • When resizing the window to the default size, the viewer would sometimes leave a border around the remote desktop if the remote desktop size was less than the local desktop size.
    • The viewer window will now be automatically resized to the default size/position whenever the span mode is changed.

12. The Java TurboVNC Viewer will no longer attempt to send a desktop resize message to servers that don't support it. This fixes a "Broken pipe" error that occurred when the -desktopsize parameter was used when connecting to the TurboVNC 1.2.x Server (or earlier versions.)

13. Fixed multiple issues in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer related to full-screen mode, desktop resizing, spanning, scaling, and the interaction thereof.

    • When in full-screen mode, resizing the remote desktop sometimes produced unexpected results, such as residual images of the old remote desktop appearing around the borders of the new desktop.
    • The calculations for automatic spanning now take into account whether scaling is enabled. Previously, the decision as to whether to span the window across one screen or multiple screens was based on the unscaled remote desktop size.
    • When scaling is enabled, the default window position/size is now computed correctly. Previously, it was computed based on the unscaled remote desktop size.
    • The viewer window will now be automatically resized to the default size/position whenever the span mode or scaling factor is changed, or whenever the remote desktop size changes.

14. On Un*x/X11 platforms, the Java TurboVNC Viewer will now send and set the PRIMARY clipboard selection by default (thus enabling middle mouse button copy/paste between the server and the client.) This can be disabled by setting the turbovnc.primary system property to false.

15. The Java TurboVNC Viewer can now optionally use an external SSH client when the ExtSSH parameter is set to 1. The full SSH command line can also be specified using the VNC_VIA_CMD and VNC_TUNNEL_CMD environment variables, as with the native viewers. See the TurboVNC User's Guide for more details.

16. All JAR files in the official TurboVNC packages for Linux are signed using an official code signing certificate, to comply with applet/JWS security requirements in Java 7u51 and later.

17. The vncviewer-java.bat and vncviewer-javaw.bat scripts, which are used to launch the Java TurboVNC Viewer on Windows systems, did not work unless the current directory was the TurboVNC install directory. This has been fixed.

18. Sending Alt+{letter} key sequences to the server (for instance, to pop up one of the menus in an application) did not work properly when using the Java TurboVNC Viewer. This has been fixed.

1.2.2

Significant changes relative to 1.2.1:

1. The Xvnc build system has been completely refactored and now uses CMake, just like the rest of TurboVNC. This makes the build somewhat more intuitive (for instance, make xserver is no longer necessary when building Xvnc), and it fixes various problems with cross-compiling.

2. Xvnc can now be built and run successfully on OS X and PowerPC platforms.

3. The default DPI of the X server has been changed to 96, to match that of recent X.org releases and other VNC implementations. This may make fonts appear larger than in previous TurboVNC releases. Passing an argument of -dpi 75 to vncserver restores the old behavior.

4. When the server is run with a depth of 8, PseudoColor visuals now work properly (previously, the correct colormap was not always used.) The server now uses a PseudoColor visual as the default for depth=8, which matches the behavior of other VNC solutions.

5. Added a security option to the Java TurboVNC Viewer that, when enabled, will prevent the user from opening any new VNC connections from within the same viewer instance. In listen mode, this will further cause the viewer to exit after the first connection is closed.

6. Added a profiling feature to the Java TurboVNC Viewer.

7. The libjpeg-turbo JNI libraries are now deployed with the Java TurboVNC Viewer on Un*x and Windows, so it is no longer necessary to install the libjpeg-turbo SDK on those platforms in order to get accelerated JPEG decompression.

8. Fixed a couple of cosmetic issues with the automatic lossless refresh feature:

   • If the source of a CopyRect operation was affected by lossy compression (meaning that the destination of the operation will become lossy as well), then the destination region is now ALR-eligible. This can be overridden by setting the environment variable TVNC_ALRCOPYRECT to 0.
   • Previously, if TVNC_ALRALL=0, a PutImage operation would trigger an ALR on all lossy regions of the display, even those that weren't drawn using a PutImage operation. This has been fixed.

9. The Mac packaging system now uses pkgbuild and productbuild rather than PackageMaker (which is obsolete and no longer supported.) This means that OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" or later must be used when packaging TurboVNC, although the packages produced can be installed on OS X 10.5 "Leopard" or later. OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is no longer supported.

10. Fixed various usability issues related to the display of dialogs in the Java TurboVNC Viewer:

    • The ability to control the Options dialog with the keyboard was lost after the first time the dialog was popped up and dismissed.
    • When running as an applet, clicking away from some of the dialogs would, in some cases, send the dialog to the back of the window stack, making it difficult to recover.
    • When running under Java 7 on Linux, dialogs that are not attached to a window (including the New Connection, Authentication, and SSH dialogs) were not showing up in the task switcher, so accidentally clicking away from one of those dialogs would send it to the back of the window stack, and Alt-Tab could not be used to recover it.
    • When running in full-screen mode on Linux/GNOME, popping up the Options or Clipboard dialogs would cause the viewer to temporarily exit full-screen mode.

11. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, when running as an applet, it would not read the applet parameters if an SSH connection error was encountered and the applet was reloaded in the browser.

12. The AlwaysShowConnectionDialog parameter is now automatically disabled in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whenever SSH tunneling is enabled. This prevents an issue whereby the "New TurboVNC Connection" dialog would pop up and display "localhost:{some random port}" after SSH authentication was completed, thus causing confusion.

13. The Java TurboVNC Viewer was not displaying dialogs from its built-in SSH client, which caused the SSH client to fail if the host was not in the known hosts file. This has been fixed.

14. If the TurboVNC Server receives a clipboard update larger than 1 MB from a connected viewer, it will now ignore the update instead of disconnecting the viewer.

15. The Java TurboVNC Viewer can now be used to connect to UltraVNC Repeater instances. Refer to the documentation for the Via parameter for more details.

16. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, if a connection was established using SSH tunneling and another connection was then opened, the viewer would fail to exit after all of these connections were subsequently closed.

17. Fixed an issue in the vncserver script whereby the TurboVNC Server would give an "Unrecognized option" error and fail to launch if the server was built without the optional Java viewer.

18. Fixed a regression in the "automatic" spanning mode of the Windows TurboVNC Viewer introduced in TurboVNC 1.2. Ever since that release, "automatic" spanning mode has been behaving just like "primary" mode.

19. Fixed a segfault in Xvnc that would occur whenever a viewer that was using ZRLE encoding disconnected.

20. The following improvements have been made to The TurboVNC Server init script:

    • The script now looks for the tvncservers file under @TVNC_CONFDIR@/sysconfig (where @TVNC_CONFDIR@ is the directory specified in the TVNC_CONFDIR CMake variable) in addition to under /etc/sysconfig. This allows the script to work properly when installed in an arbitrary directory.
    • When invoked with the start argument, the script now attempts to start only those TurboVNC sessions specified in the tvncservers file that have not yet been started. If all sessions in the tvncservers file have been started, then the script does nothing. To be consistent with other init scripts, a success message is not printed/logged unless one or more TurboVNC sessions is actually started successfully, and a failure message is not printed/logged unless one or more TurboVNC sessions fails to start.
    • When invoked with the start argument, the script will no longer abort if a TurboVNC session fails to start. It will attempt to start the other sessions.
    • When invoked with the reload argument, the script will now stop any running TurboVNC sessions not specified in the tvncservers file and start any sessions specified in the tvncservers file that aren't running.
    • Fixed a bug whereby, if an error occurred when starting a TurboVNC session, the error was not properly logged to the system error log.
    • The script should now work on Red Hat Enterprise/CentOS 7 and recent Fedora releases.

21. The restricted, nounixlogin, and user options in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer are no longer persistent from one session to the next. Because those options can only be specified on the command line or in a connection info file, automatically restoring their previous values for subsequent connections to the same host and display number led to confusing behavior. The viewer would apply the previous value of the option, thus changing the viewer's behavior, but there was no way to visually confirm why the behavior had been changed or to change it back (unless you knew the corresponding command-line counter-curse, but restricted actually didn't have one. Oops.) The encoding and 8bit options have been non-persistent for quite some time, for this same reason.

1.2.1

Significant changes relative to 1.2:

1. Fixed two regressions introduced in TurboVNC 1.0, one of which prevented older (RFB <= 3.3) VNC viewers from connecting successfully to the TurboVNC Server and the other of which prevented viewers other than TurboVNC and TightVNC from connecting to the TurboVNC Server using no authentication.

2. Added a new parameter (EncPassword) to the Java TurboVNC Viewer that allows the password to be specified in encrypted ASCII hex.

3. The toolbar buttons in the Java TurboVNC Viewer that send keystrokes are now disabled when view-only mode is selected.

4. Enabled the MIT-SCREEN-SAVER X extension in the TurboVNC Server. Modern screen savers don't actually use this extension, but it provides an easy way for applications to query the idle time of the X server.

5. Fixed a regression introduced in 1.2 beta1 whereby the TurboVNC Viewer desktop shortcut installed with the Linux RPM did not work properly.

6. Fixed a bug in the Java TurboVNC Viewer's RRE decoder that was causing pixels to be displayed incorrectly.

7. Pressing F8 (or the chosen menu key) twice in the Java TurboVNC Viewer now sends that keystroke to the VNC server. This emulates the behavior of the X11 viewer.

8. Added an option to vncserver that allows the output of Xvnc to be redirected to an arbitrary file.

9. Implemented the X RANDR extension in the TurboVNC Server. The main purpose of this at the moment is to placate applications that check for the extension and refuse to start without it. The extension currently can't be used to change the screen size (that feature will be in TurboVNC 2.0.)

10. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, when a mouse button was pressed, pressing another button or activating the scroll wheel would cause the viewer to send a release event for the first button.

11. Fixed an issue whereby the X11 TurboVNC Viewer would fail to authenticate if the encrypted password stored in the connection info file started with "00".

12. Fixed an invalid memory access that occurred in the TurboVNC Server after a viewer disconnected. This had the visible effect of causing an error (Could not disable TCP corking: Bad file descriptor) to be printed to the TurboVNC Server's log, but it was not known to cause any other issues.

13. Fixed an issue that prevented clipboard transfer from working properly with applications that request the clipboard selection in a non-ASCII format. This was specifically known to affect rxvt-unicode.

14. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer should now build properly with Visual Studio

16. The "Uninstall TurboVNC" app should once again work on OS X 10.5.

17. Added two new command-line options to PuTTY, -L4 and -L6. These work just like -L, except that -L4 forces PuTTY to use an IPv4 interface for the client side of the SSH tunnel, and -L6 forces PuTTY to use an IPv6 interface for the client side of the SSH tunnel.

18. Worked around an issue whereby the Java/Mac TurboVNC Viewer would abort with InStream max string length exceeded when connecting to recent versions of the RealVNC Server. This was due to a protocol conflict. Apparently, RealVNC uses pseudo-encoding number -311 for their CursorWithAlpha extension, but TigerVNC uses -311 for ClientRedirect. At least for now, ClientRedirect has been disabled in the Java TurboVNC Viewer by default, but there is a new hidden parameter (ClientRedirect) that can be set to 1 to re-enable it.

19. Due to an oversight, the 3-button mouse emulation feature in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer was being enabled by default. This has been fixed. 3-button mouse emulation is largely unnecessary with modern systems, and the feature is known to cause issues with certain applications.

1.2

Significant changes relative to 1.2 beta1:

1. The Mac TurboVNC Viewer no longer has a separate menu for the "About" and "Preferences" options. As is the case with most Mac applications, these options are now accessed from the application menu.

2. Opening VNC viewer connection info (.vnc) files in the OS X Finder or dragging and dropping them onto the Mac TurboVNC Viewer icon now works properly. Additionally, if a connection is already open, dragging and dropping a .vnc file onto the Mac TurboVNC Viewer icon will now open a new connection.

3. VNC viewer connection info (.vnc) files can now be opened in Windows by dragging and dropping them onto the Windows TurboVNC Viewer icon.

4. The Java TurboVNC Viewer can now be built and run with Java 5. Consequently, the Mac TurboVNC Viewer now works with the version of Java shipped with OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

5. Previously, when using the Java TurboVNC Viewer on Mac platforms, the menu bar was still visible in full-screen mode, and the dock was still visible if it was not set to auto-hide. The Java/Mac TurboVNC Viewer now takes advantage of the OS X Lion full-screen feature, if available, to provide a "true" full-screen mode on OS X 10.7 and later. On OS X 10.6 and earlier, the behavior is unchanged.

6. Fixed a regression in the new Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby, when used as an applet, specifying a host other than the web server in the Server parameter had no effect.

7. Fixed various key mapping issues in the Java TurboVNC Viewer:

   • The viewer now differentiates between the numeric keypad versions of the navigation keys (Home, End, etc.) and their equivalents on the main keyboard.
   • The viewer now differentiates between the left and right versions of the modifier keys (Alt, Ctrl, etc.)
   • The viewer now properly handles the AltGr key on international keyboards.
   • Left Alt key sequences on Mac clients can now be used to activate pull-down menus on Linux/Windows servers.
   • The Apple keys on Macintosh keyboards can now be used as Windows keys when connecting to Linux and Windows servers.

8. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer now properly differentiates between the numeric keypad versions of the navigation keys (Home, End, etc.) and their equivalents on the main keyboard.

9. Fixed a minor issue in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer whereby it would trigger an Alt keypress on the remote desktop whenever an AltGr key symbol was typed repeatedly.

10. Added LSB headers to the TurboVNC Server init.d script (tvncserver) in order to avoid insserv errors/warnings with recent Debian releases.

11. The TurboVNC Server can now build its font path from a font catalogue, on systems that support them (such as RHEL 6.) vncserver will now check for the existence of a font catalogue at /etc/X11/fontpath.d and use it if it exists. For systems that do not support font catalogues, vncserver will now check for the existence of the Liberation fonts (used by LibreOffice) and the Ghostscript fonts and add them to the fontpath.

12. Fixed an error that occurred when running /etc/init.d/tvncserver stop with an empty /etc/sysconfig/tvncservers file.

13. Fixed an issue whereby the X11 TurboVNC Viewer would fail with an error message of Password stored in connection info file is invalid when loading a connection info file in which the encrypted password contained "00".

14. Fixed an issue with the multi-monitor spanning feature in the Mac/Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby the remote desktop would appear on the secondary monitor instead of the primary monitor when the span mode was set to "Primary" (or when the span mode was set to "Auto" and the remote desktop area was less than the primary monitor area.)

15. Fixed Xvnc build errors on Solaris and FreeBSD.

16. The X11 TurboVNC Viewer will now temporarily ungrab the keyboard if the viewer window loses focus while the keyboard is grabbed (when not in full-screen mode, this can happen if the user clicks on another window, or if a notification dialog from the window manager pops up.)

17. Fixed TurboVNC Server build issues that occurred under Ubuntu 13.04 (and possibly other new Linux distros.)

18. The default xstartup.turbovnc script that the TurboVNC Server creates will now use the GNOME fallback window manager on Ubuntu 12.10 and later, assuming that the "gnome-session-fallback" package is installed. TurboVNC cannot use Unity 3D (yet), and Unity 2D was removed in Ubuntu 12.10 and later.

19. Fixed a segfault that occurred when starting the TurboVNC Server on Ubuntu 13.04 and Fedora 18 (and possibly other new Linux distros.)

20. The X11 TurboVNC Viewer will now automatically release the modifier keys if the viewer window loses focus. This fixes an issue whereby using Alt-Tab to switch windows would leave the Alt key in a pressed state on the server.

21. The Java TurboVNC Viewer was ignoring the PORT parameter when SSH tunneling was enabled. This has been fixed.

22. Fixed an issue whereby the Java TurboVNC Viewer window would not close if the server disconnected and the viewer was either running in listen mode or it had more than one connection open.

23. Since there is no way to see the console output in a Java Web Start environment or when starting the Java TurboVNC Viewer from an icon, it is difficult or impossible in such cases to debug errors that are only displayed to the console. Thus, the Java TurboVNC Viewer now displays all errors both to the console and in an error dialog.

24. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby pressing Alt-Tab would change the keyboard focus to another window but would not bring the other window to the top. This was originally a feature, not a bug, and was meant to be a stopgap substitute for a proper keyboard grabbing feature, but the behavior causes confusion and does not achieve the primary goal that a keyboard grabber should achieve (sending special keystrokes to the server.)

25. Fixed an issue in the TurboVNC Server whereby the value of $desktopName was being ignored if it was present in the TurboVNC config file.

1.1.90 (1.2 beta1)

Significant changes relative to 1.1:

1. Modified the default xstartup.turbovnc script so that it loads the 2D rather than the 3D version of the window manager on recent Ubuntu systems. This specifically fixes an issue whereby the Unity window manager in Ubuntu 12.04 would not display its menus.

2. Added a command-line switch (-norender) to Xvnc that can be used to disable the X RENDER extension.

3. Added a command-line option (-xstartup) to vncserver that allows a custom startup script to be specified. This is useful along with the -fg switch, because it allows a full-screen application to be launched without a window manager and causes the TurboVNC session to terminate when the application exits.

4. The Java TurboVNC Viewer has been completely rewritten and now supports most of the features of the TurboVNC native viewers, as well as all of the features of, and a rich GUI inspired by, the TigerVNC 1.2 Java viewer. In addition, the new Java TurboVNC Viewer has the ability to use libjpeg-turbo via JNI to decompress JPEG images, giving it levels of performance approaching the native viewers. It also has an embedded SSH client and fully-integrated support for SSH tunneling. The new Java viewer now replaces the X11 TurboVNC Viewer on Mac systems, since it has higher overall performance on that platform (due to performance limitations of XQuartz) and much better usability.

5. IPv6 support

6. Implemented v0.10 of the X RENDER extension, to address compatibility problems with newer applications that assumed v0.10 functionality was available without checking for it.

7. Overhauled the build and packaging system. All platforms now use CMake, and the Java code can be built either as part of a Unix or Windows build or as a stand-alone project.

8. Renamed the resource file for the X11 TurboVNC Viewer to "Tvncviewer" to avoid conflicts with TightVNC. This specifically fixes an issue whereby the TurboVNC Viewer would display its menus and titlebar incorrectly when running on a system that had the TightVNC Viewer installed.

9. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer now accepts a scaling factor of fixedratio when using the /scale switch on the command line. This was previously called "Auto" in the GUI, but the name was changed to match the Java TurboVNC Viewer.

10. All default options in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer now have a command-line equivalent, which is useful in case the defaults are overridden using a resource file.

11. Added a keyboard grabbing feature to the Windows TurboVNC Viewer so that it can optionally send special keystrokes (Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Esc, Menu key, etc.) to the VNC server. The default behavior of this option is to enable grabbing only in full-screen mode (as the X11 TurboVNC Viewer already did), but a command-line option (-grabkeyboard) can be used to configure keyboard grabbing to be always on or always off. Additionally, grabbing can always be turned on/off by pressing CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-G. The X11 TurboVNC Viewer has been extended to support the same functionality.

12. Where possible, the naming of command-line options, resources, menu options, and parameters has been reconciled among the Windows, X11, and Java TurboVNC Viewers.

13. The multi-screen window spanning feature in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer should now behave properly when fixed-ratio scaling is used.

14. Fixed a logic error in the "automatic" spanning mode of the Windows TurboVNC Viewer, whereby it would try to extend the remote desktop window horizontally across multiple screens if the remote desktop height was taller than the local screen but the width was the same.

15. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer will now return a non-zero exit status if it encounters an error. This allows batch scripts to start the viewer with start /wait and check its exit status.

16. The /password option in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer should now work again.

17. Fixed an intermittent failure with the idle timeout feature in the TurboVNC Server. This failure was caused by the fact that the X server used a 32-bit value to store the number of milliseconds since 1970, and this value was wrapping around to 0 every 49 days. If a TurboVNC session was started near the end of one of these 49-day cycles and the idle timeout was set for several days into the future, the expiration value for the timer would wrap around and become lower than the current time, thus causing the TurboVNC Server to exit.

18. Worked around a bug in the version of TigerVNC Server that ships with Red Hat/CentOS 6, whereby dragging links from Firefox (running on the remote desktop) to the remote desktop would cause the X11 TurboVNC Viewer to crash.

19. Added support for the RFB flow control extensions developed by the TigerVNC Project. Clients that support these extensions (including TurboVNC 1.2 and later and TigerVNC 1.2 and later) can receive updates from the server without having to explicitly request them, which improves performance on high-latency networks.

20. The titlebar of all flavors of the TurboVNC Viewer now displays the last encoding received from the server rather than the requested encoding. This is useful when connecting to RealVNC and other servers that do not support Tight encoding.

21. Implemented an interframe comparison engine (ICE) in the TurboVNC Server, which prevents duplicate framebuffer updates from being sent as a result of an application drawing the same thing over and over again. The ICE will normally be enabled when Compression Level 5 or above is requested by a VNC viewer, but you can also enable/disable it manually by passing command-line arguments to Xvnc.

22. Added experimental (and currently undocumented) support for the -via and -tunnel command-line options to the Windows TurboVNC Viewer. These work the same way as the equivalent options in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer. Currently, they require Cygwin SSH, since PLink does not have the ability to detach its process after authentication.

1.1

Significant changes relative to 1.1 beta1:

1. Improved the behavior of the automatic lossless refresh feature so that it doesn't send an ALR for screen regions that were sent using JPEG but then re-sent using a lossless subencoding (such as color index) prior to the ALR being triggered.

2. Previously, empty cursors were not encoded correctly by the TurboVNC Server, and this caused some VNC viewers (notably, TigerVNC) to render a system default cursor instead of the empty cursor. This has been fixed.

3. Fixed the rendering of empty cursors in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer. This also fixed an issue whereby the viewer would crash when opening recent versions of xterm in the TurboVNC session.

4. Fixed a crash (xcb_io.c:507: _XReply: Assertion '!dpy->xcb->reply_data' failed) that occurred when running recent versions of twm in a TurboVNC session. Fixing this also fixed an issue in openSUSE 12 whereby Xvnc would abort with could not open default font 'fixed'.

5. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer will now properly switch into/out of full-screen mode whenever the "Full-screen mode" check box is selected or de-selected in the TurboVNC Viewer Options dialog and a connection is active.

6. Fixed an issue whereby the Windows TurboVNC Viewer window would remain on top of other windows and dialogs (including dialogs raised by the TurboVNC Viewer itself) when exiting full-screen mode.

7. Beginning with 1.1 beta1, whenever the Windows TurboVNC Viewer left full-screen mode, it would set the window size and position to default values. It now restores the window's size and position to the values they had before the viewer was placed in full-screen mode. An option has been added to the system menu to manually resize and reposition the window to default values (taking into account the spanning option.)

8. Added Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F and Ctrl-Alt-Shift-R hotkeys to the X11 TurboVNC Viewer to toggle full-screen mode and request a refresh (respectively.) These emulate the behavior of the Windows TurboVNC Viewer.

9. Fixed several invalid reads/writes reported by valgrind. These occurred under certain circumstances when a Tight-compatible viewer disconnected from a TurboVNC session, and the issues were known to cause one rare segfault when disconnecting from a TurboVNC session that had multithreading and ALR enabled.

10. Fixed an issue whereby selecting text in xterm would sometimes cause the Windows TurboVNC Viewer to abort with "Failed to open clipboard."

11. Fixed an issue whereby clipboard changes were being immediately sent back to the viewer as soon as they were received by the server. This specifically caused copy/paste operations in some Windows applications to behave incorrectly, since the clipboard contents were being converted from Unicode to ASCII when they were bounced back.

1.0.90 (1.1 beta1)

Significant changes relative to 1.0.2:

1. autocutsel has been replaced with a more robust and configurable clipboard transfer mechanism based on the VNC X11 extension and the vncconfig utility used by RealVNC.

2. The Unix TurboVNC Server now implements the X RENDER extension, which enables font anti-aliasing and animated cursors and fixes various issues with KDE 4. Additionally, the server now embeds the FreeType library for improved font display and compatibility.

3. Replaced the broken "software cursor" implementation of rich (full-color) cursor rendering in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer with a proper implementation that uses the Xcursor library. This specifically fixes pointer issues that occurred when connecting to the Unix TigerVNC 1.2 Server.

4. The Unix TurboVNC Server now implements rich (full-color) cursor encoding, so viewers that support this RFB extension (including TigerVNC 1.2 and later and TurboVNC 1.1 and later) can display full-color animated cursors when connecting to the TurboVNC Server.

5. Enhanced the screen scaling feature in the Java TurboVNC Viewer and added a GUI option to control it.

6. Added an idle timeout feature to the Unix TurboVNC Server which, when enabled, will cause it to exit automatically whenever a certain number of seconds have elapsed since the last active VNC viewer connection.

7. Added a -noxstartup option to vncserver, which prevents it from executing the xstartup.turbovnc script. This is useful for those who may want to occasionally run TurboVNC without a window manager.

8. Fixed image corruption that occurred when using the Lossless Tight or Lossless Tight + Zlib protocols with the X11 TurboVNC Viewer running on a 16-bit-per-pixel X server.

9. Fixed TurboVNC Server build on ARM-based Linux systems

10. Added Xvnc command-line options and authentication configuration file directives for disabling clipboard transfer.

11. Added two options (-alrqual and -alrsamp) to Xvnc that allow for sending automatic lossless refreshes using JPEG rather than mathematically lossless images.

12. Fixed an issue whereby the Windows TurboVNC Viewer, when running on Windows 7, would display an all-white image on one of the monitors in a multi-monitor configuration the first time the viewer was switched to full-screen mode.

13. Changed the default full-screen behavior in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer such that the window only spans multiple monitors if the remote desktop will not fit on a single monitor. Added options to the command line, GUI, and .vnc file to allow users to override this behavior and force full-screen windows to always occupy one monitor or all monitors.

14. Fixed numerous issues with full-screen mode in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer.

15. Implemented -autopass option in the Windows TurboVNC Viewer, which works the same as the equivalent option in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer. In both viewers, -autopass can now be used with Unix Login Authentication as well.

16. Added an option to the F8 menu in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer that allows view-only mode to be enabled/disabled on an active VNC connection.

17. The TurboVNC Server should now build and run properly on FreeBSD.

18. Added ZRLE encoding to the Unix TurboVNC Server, which may improve performance with the RealVNC Viewer under certain circumstances.

19. The Windows TurboVNC Server (WinVNC) is no longer provided, as it was badly broken, and the only way to fix it would have involved a complete re-architecture.

20. The TurboVNC Server now includes a non-functional implementation of the X Input extension, primarily to avoid crashes in recent versions of GNOME that aren't smart enough to check for that extension's existence before using it.

21. Implemented an authentication plugin mechanism for the Java TurboVNC Viewer, which allows sites to write their own external class for obtaining Unix login authentication credentials.

22. Although there were no known issues with the implementation of the automatic lossless refresh feature in TurboVNC 1.0.x, the feature was re-implemented without the use of threads, in order to make it easier to maintain.

1.0.2

Significant changes relative to 1.0.1:

1. Fixed seg fault in the Unix TurboVNC Server which occurred under certain rare circumstances when disconnecting a viewer from a server that was using multi-threaded compression.

2. If the user overrides the location of the password file (by passing -rfbauth {file} to vncserver), then vncserver will no longer prompt the user to create a new VNC password if ~/.vnc/passwd does not exist.

3. Fixed seg fault in the Unix TurboVNC Server which occurred under certain rare circumstances when shutting down a server that was using multi-threaded compression.

4. Fixed an issue in the Java TurboVNC Viewer whereby it was sending spurious KeyPress/KeyRelease events in conjunction with certain mouse events.

5. Numerous build system changes, including the use of CMake for Windows builds and support for out-of-tree Xvnc builds.

6. Added a -config option to the X11 TurboVNC Viewer which allows it to read .vnc connection info files saved by the Windows TurboVNC Viewer.

1.0.1

Significant changes relative to 1.0:

1. Fixed seg fault in the Unix TurboVNC Server which occurred in the miRegionDestroy() function under certain rare circumstances.

2. Fixed seg fault in the Unix TurboVNC Server which occurred in the cfb32ClippedLineCopy() function under certain rare circumstances.

3. vncserver arguments can now be specified in the /etc/sysconfig/tvncservers file using an array called VNCSERVERARGS. This works the same as in RealVNC

5. The -via option in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer now uses ephemeral ports to bind the client side of the SSH tunnel. This should prevent port conflicts that could occur when multiple vncviewer instances tried to use the -via option simultaneously.

1.0

Significant changes relative to 1.0 beta1:

1. The Windows TurboVNC Viewer should now work properly with displays that use a 24-bit (as opposed to a 32-bit) pixel format (this includes Remote Desktop and Citrix sessions.)

2. Eliminated the use of the dangerous alloca() (stack-based allocation) function in Xvnc and replaced it with heap-based allocation (malloc() and free().)

3. Eliminated a segfault in pthread_join() which would occur under certain circumstances when using multithreading in the TurboVNC Server.

4. To maintain consistency with other versions of VNC, added -nohttpd option to vncserver as an alias for -nohttp.

5. Fixed an issue whereby certain applications which draw hundreds of thousands of tiny lines or points on the screen would cause the TurboVNC Viewer to abort with an "unhandled message type" error or would cause the viewer to freeze for several minutes.

6. Fixed a security loophole whereby RealVNC viewers were able to connect with a blank password if PAM and OTP authentication were enabled on the TurboVNC Server and the OTP was not set.

0.6.90 (1.0 beta1)

Significant changes relative to 0.6:

1. Multi-threaded the Tight encoder in the Unix/Linux TurboVNC Server so that it can take advantage of multi-core systems. See documentation for further details.

2. Added authentication extensions which allow viewers to authenticate using one-time passwords and Unix login credentials. See documentation and man pages for details.

3. Added scroll wheel support to the Java TurboVNC viewer (requires JRE 1.4 or later.)

4. Added automatic lossless refresh (ALR) feature, which sends a mathematically lossless copy of the screen during periods of inactivity. See documentation for details.

5. For Linux, Mac/Intel, Solaris/x86, and Windows systems, the default build of TurboVNC no longer uses TurboJPEG/IPP (which was based on the proprietary Intel Performance Primitives) or Sun mediaLib. Instead, TurboVNC now uses libjpeg-turbo, a fully open source vector-accelerated JPEG codec developed in conjunction with the TigerVNC Project (and based on libjpeg/SIMD.)

   As a result of this, the TurboVNC RPMs and DEBs are now self-contained.

6. The uninstall script in the Mac distribution package should now work on OS X 10.6.

7. Added 64-bit Solaris and Windows binary packages, as well as a universal 32/64-bit binary package for OS X.

8. Fixed a number of interaction issues between turbovncserver.conf and the vncserver script, and added configuration file options for the new TurboVNC features, such as ALR.

9. Performance of the OS X viewer should generally be better (prior versions were not being built with compiler optimizations, due to the use of the antiquated imake build system.)

10. Generally robustified vncserver -kill. In this release, if Xvnc aborts unexpectedly for any reason, then attempting to run vncserver -kill :N for the session will print a warning message about the process aborting and will then try to clean up the orphaned X socket files. If Xvnc deadlocks, then attempting to run vncserver -kill :N will warn about the deadlock and forego deleting the PID file (so you can kill -9 the process yourself and then re-run vncserver -kill to clean up the orphaned files.)

11. Integrated autocutsel into the TurboVNC Server distribution for Unix/Linux in order to work around issues with the clipboard transfer feature.

12. In the Windows TurboVNC Viewer, full-screen mode will now span all monitors in a multi-monitor configuration, not just the primary monitor.

13. Added automatic clipboard transfer to the Java TurboVNC Viewer.

14. Removed the warning dialog in the Windows viewer if full screen mode is activated via a hotkey (the reasoning being that if the user knows the hotkey to activate full screen mode, then they know how to deactivate it as well.)

15. Fixed an issue whereby the TurboVNC Server would crash when a VirtualGL window was resized to larger than 2.75 megapixels.

16. Added double buffering option to Java TurboVNC Viewer.

17. "Login again" button now works when running the Java TurboVNC Viewer as a standalone application.

18. Fix a couple of potential buffer overruns in Xvnc's embedded HTTP server.

0.6

Significant changes relative to 0.5.1:

1. Integrated TightVNC 1.3.10 enhancements and fixes, including 64-bit support for Linux and Solaris. See the TightVNC Change Log (WhatsNew or WhatsNew.txt) for more details.

2. When connecting a TigerVNC or TightVNC Viewer to a TurboVNC server, the TurboVNC server will now translate JPEG quality levels into actual JPEG quality and subsampling using the same translation table used by the TigerVNC Server. See the TurboVNC User's Guide for more details.

3. Created the TurboVNC User's Guide, which mostly consists of the TurboVNC chapters that were formerly in the VirtualGL User's Guide.

4. Fixed an issue on OpenSolaris whereby a TurboVNC session would start but would display a blank X Windows screen with no window manager. This was due to the vncserver script passing an argument of -nolisten local to Xvnc on all Sun platforms, and this doesn't work on OpenSolaris. The -nolisten local option was necessary to get Xvnc to work on earlier versions of Solaris, but it is no longer necessary with Solaris 10. If you are running TurboVNC on an older Solaris release, then you can pass -nolisten local to /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver to get back the behavior of TurboVNC 0.5.x (or uncomment that line in the vncserver script.)

0.5.1

Significant changes relative to 0.5:

1. Fixed a buffer overrun issue in TurboJPEG/mediaLib that may have caused problems on Solaris/x86 TurboVNC hosts.

2. Developed a proper uninstaller app for the Mac OS X TurboVNC package.

3. Modified MAXINST variable in SUNWtvnc Solaris package to prevent multiple instances of this package from being installed simultaneously.

0.5

This release was historically part of the Sun Shared Visualization v1.1.1 product.

Significant changes relative to 0.4:

1. The Windows TurboVNC Server now works properly (albeit more slowly) when the host's graphics card is configured for a 16-bit pixel depth.

2. 0.4[12] was supposed to allow vncserver to work even if xauth was not in the PATH, but unfortunately there was a bug in that patch. This bug has been fixed, so vncserver should now really work if xauth is not in the PATH.

3. It was discovered that pure JPEG encoding was not the most efficient method of compression for all 3D image workloads. Particularly, CAD applications and other types of applications that generate images with sharp edges and reduced color palettes compress much better with traditional Tight encoding. However, traditional Tight encoding is too slow to stream real-time full-screen 3D images. Thus, a hybrid scheme was developed which uses the fastest elements of Tight encoding with minimal Zlib compression for low-color-depth image tiles and continues to use TurboJPEG for high-color-depth image tiles. The resulting compression scheme should be both tighter and faster than the pure TurboJPEG protocol used by previous versions of TurboVNC.

4. The Unix TurboVNC Server now executes ~/.vnc/xstartup.turbovnc instead of ~/.vnc/xstartup. This is to avoid conflicts with other VNC flavors.

5. Shift-Click and Control-Click now work properly when using the X11 TurboVNC Viewer.

6. Further optimized the Huffman encoder in the mediaLib implementation of TurboJPEG. This should decrease the CPU usage when running TurboVNC on Solaris hosts, particularly Solaris/x86 hosts.

7. When running in OpenSolaris, the default xstartup.turbovnc file did not launch JDS, since the JDS launch script is in a different location on that platform. This resulted in a TurboVNC session that had no window manager. This has been fixed.

8. Increased TCP send buffer size to 64k in the Windows TurboVNC Server. This should improve performance significantly.

9. Generally improved compatibility with TightVNC and RealVNC. This included adding back in the Hextile decoder to the TurboVNC Viewer and adding back in support for 8-bit and 16-bit color depths (in both the viewer and the server.) See the TurboVNC Compatibility Guide for more information.

10. Changed default pixel format for Solaris TurboVNC sessions to ARGB/BGRA. This should improve performance by a bit on SPARC hosts.

11. Added 200% scaling option to the Windows TurboVNC Viewer GUI.

12. The TurboVNC server script now tries to figure out an appropriate font path for the system rather than using the X Font Server, since xfs is not universally available. If the script fails to figure out an appropriate font path, then it will fall back to using xfs.

13. Changed the scrollbar behavior in the X11 TurboVNC Viewer to more closely match that of "modern" windowing systems, in which the left mouse button is used to scroll in both directions.

14. Fixed an issue whereby GNOME would fail to start on SuSE 10 TurboVNC hosts if CSh was the default shell. The issue was that /opt/gnome/bin was not being added to the PATH by /etc/csh.cshrc. This was worked around by adding it to the PATH in ~/.vnc/xstartup.turbovnc.

15. On Solaris machines, the TurboVNC Server will attempt to load the window manager startup script specified in ~/.dt/sessions/lastsession. This caused problems if the home directory was shared among multiple machines and the startup script did not exist on some of the machines (for instance, if the user's default windowing environment was JDS but they attempted to start TurboVNC on an older Solaris machine that had only CDE.) This has been fixed by adding a line to xstartup.turbovnc which checks to make sure that the script specified in ~/.dt/sessions/lastsession exists and is executable before executing it.

16. Fixed a bug in the color conversion routines of TurboJPEG/mediaLib which caused the Solaris TurboVNC Viewer to display spurious multi-colored vertical lines when 2X or 4X subsampling was used.

17. When requesting a Lossless Refresh using the TurboVNC Viewer on a Linux or Solaris/x86 client, the pixels obscured by the F8 dialog will be regenerated using lossy compression after the lossless refresh has occurred. This makes the lossless refresh somewhat ineffective. We were not able to find a fix for this in 0.5, but as a workaround, you can now use the hotkey sequence CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-L to request a Lossless Refresh without popping up the F8 dialog.

0.4

This release was historically part of the Sun Shared Visualization v1.1 product.

Significant changes relative to 0.3.3:

1. Added relevant patches from TightVNC 1.3.9

2. Added lossless refresh feature, which instructs the server to send a mathematically lossless (Zlib-encoded RGB) copy of the current screen. This feature does not currently work with the Windows TurboVNC Server, because the Windows TurboVNC Server processes framebuffer update requests asynchronously.

3. Modified /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver so that it invokes Xvnc with the arguments -deferupdate 1. This sets the deferred update timer to 1 ms rather than its default value of 40 ms, which has two effects:

   • It improves the performance of Solaris TurboVNC sessions dramatically when connecting to them over a high-speed network.
   • It eliminates the need for the "High-Latency Network" switch in the TurboVNC Viewer. In prior versions of TurboVNC, leaving this switch on when connecting over a high-speed network incurred a severe performance penalty. Since this is no longer the case, the switch is left on all the time and is no longer configurable.

   NOTE: The afore-mentioned performance penalty will still be incurred when connecting a TurboVNC 0.4 viewer to an older (pre-0.4) TurboVNC server over a high-speed network. Start the server with /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncserver -deferupdate 1 to avoid this, or simply upgrade the server to 0.4.

4. Added an option for lossless (uncompressed RGB) image encoding. This is useful for reducing CPU usage on the host and client (at the expense of increased network usage) when connecting over a gigabit (or faster) network.

5. Added a "Medium Quality" connection profile to the Windows, X11, and Java TurboVNC Viewers (and subsequently removed the "Broadband (favor image quality)" profile, which is no longer necessary due to [3].) The "Medium Quality" profile sets the JPEG quality to 80 with 2X chrominance subsampling, which (on average) should use about half the bandwidth of the "High Quality" profile (quality=95, no subsampling) and twice the bandwidth of the "Low Quality" profile (quality=30, 4x subsampling.)

6. Added an additional subsampling option to enable grayscale JPEG encoding. This provides additional bandwidth savings over and above chrominance subsampling, since grayscale throws away all chrominance pixels. It is potentially useful when working with applications that already render grayscale images (medical imaging, etc.)

7. Fixed embedded Java viewer in the Windows TurboVNC Server (.jar file did not include all of the necessary classes)

8. Created symlink from /opt/TurboVNC to /opt/SUNWtvnc in the Solaris packages so that Solaris and Linux would have a consistent interface.

9. Removed unnecessary pixel format translation when sending JPEG from a big endian server to a little endian client (or vice versa.) This improves performance a bit when connecting x86 clients to Sparc hosts or vice versa.

10. Included mediaLib Huffman encoding optimizations contributed by Sun. This boosts the performance of the Solaris TurboVNC Server and Viewer by as much as 30%.

11. Changed default geometry to 1240x900, an appropriate size for most 1280x1024 displays.

12. vncserver now looks for xauth in /usr/X11R6/bin and /usr/openwin/bin before searching the PATH. Those directories are sometimes not in the PATH on Linux and Solaris systems.

13. Modified Mac package such that /opt/TurboVNC/bin/vncviewer links to /opt/TurboVNC/lib/libturbojpeg.dylib rather than to /opt/VirtualGL/lib/libturbojpeg.dylib (oops.) This was causing the Mac TurboVNC Viewer to fail unless VirtualGL was also installed.

14. Included an optimized version of PuTTY 0.60 in the Windows build (and viewer package.) It is recommended that this version be used when tunneling TurboVNC connections over SSH, as it will perform as much as 4X as fast as the stock version of PuTTY 0.60.

15. Fixed bug in vncserver script which was uncovered by running it with recent versions of Perl.

16. Changed name of options registry key to avoid conflict with TightVNC

17. Open Java viewer in a new window (edit /opt/TurboVNC/vnc/classes/index.vnc to change this back.)

0.3.3

This release was historically part of the Sun Shared Visualization v1.0.x product.

Significant changes relative to 0.3.2:

1. Added a new preset to all VNC viewers which allows the user to select both the WAN protocol optimizations and perceptually lossless image quality.

2. Added -list option to vncserver which lists all VNC sessions (not just TurboVNC sessions) running under the current user account on the current host. This new option is documented in the VGL/TVNC docs as well as the TurboVNC man pages.

3. vncserver will no longer fail if the USER environment variable is unset. That environment variable is unused in the script, so checking for its presence was apparently a vestigial feature.

4. Modified Windows build to embed a proper version number in TurboVNC.exe.

5. Changed the fallback logic in the default ~/.vnc/xstartup file so that GNOME is used as the window manager on Solaris if it is available and if ~/.dt/sessions/lastsession doesn't exist. Otherwise, CDE is used.

6. Fixed an issue whereby GNOME would fail to start in TurboVNC if TurboVNC was launched from within another X session.

0.3.2

Significant changes relative to 0.3.1:

1. Incorporated TightVNC 1.3.8 patches (where applicable)

2. Now using a single RPM to support multiple Linux distributions.

3. Fixed a couple of issues in the fallback logic of the default ~/.vnc/xstartup script. It should now properly run fvwm2 or twm if KDE, CDE, or GNOME are not available.

4. First pass at a Mac build of the TurboVNC Viewer. The Mac version is an X11 Unix app and thus needs to be run inside an xterm. It should otherwise behave and perform identically to the Linux version.

5. Increased the size of the TurboJPEG compression holding buffer to account for rare cases in which compressing very high-frequency image tiles (specifically parts of the 3D Studio MAX Viewperf test) with high quality levels (specifically Q99 or above) would produce JPEG images that are larger than the uncompressed input.

   Linux users will need to upgrade to the TurboJPEG 1.04 RPM to get this fix. For other platforms, the fix is included in the TurboVNC 0.3.2 packages.

6. Added -fg switch to vncserver to make it (optionally) run in the foreground. This allows you to kill the VNC server by pressing CTRL-C in the shell you used to start it. When in foreground mode, you can also kill the VNC server by logging out of the window manager inside the VNC session.

7. The /etc/init.d/tvncserver script, which can be used to launch multiple TurboVNC sessions at boot time, should now work properly on SuSE systems.

8. Added TurboVNC protocol optimizations to the Java viewer and made its configuration options match the other TurboVNC viewers. The Java viewer still uses a slower codec, so it is about 3X slower in a LAN environment than the native viewer. The Java viewer also lacks double buffering support. But with these new optimizations, the native and Java viewers should now perform similarly over a wide-area network.

9. Added a -password option to the Windows TurboVNC Viewer to allow one to pass the VNC password as plain text.

0.3.1

Significant changes relative to 0.3:

1. Automatically start Xvnc with -nolisten local on Solaris hosts. On Solaris, /tmp/.X11-unix is not world writable by default, so it is necessary to either start Xvnc with -nolisten local (which forces Xvnc to listen on a tcp port rather than a local pipe) or to make /tmp/.X11-unix world writable. The former approach seemed like the lesser of two evils.

2. The vncserver startup script now sets VGL_COMPRESS to 0 automatically, so it is no longer necessary to supply a -c 0 argument to vglrun when running inside a TurboVNC session.

3. The JPEG quality slider in the Unix viewer's F8 popup menu will now respond to any mouse button, not just the middle one.

4. The WAN protocol optimizations can now be switched on and off. It has been discovered that these optimizations produce slower performance on a LAN, so it is preferable only to use them on high-latency networks.

   On the Windows viewer, the "Broadband/T1" preset now enables the WAN protocol optimizations in addition to setting quality=30 and subsampling=4:1:1. Similarly, the "High-speed Network" preset disables WAN optimizations in addition to setting quality=95 and subsampling=4:4:4. WAN optimizations can also be configured via an additional check box ("High-Latency Network") in the Options dialog or through two new command line switches: /lan and /wan.

   On the Linux/Unix viewer, the default is no WAN optimizations, quality=95, and subsampling=4:4:4. You can specify an argument of -wan to enable WAN optimizations or -broadband to enable WAN optimizations, quality=30, and subsampling=4:1:1. The F8 popup menu also contains a new button for enabling/disabling WAN optimizations, and the Broadband and LAN presets in this window will enable and disable WAN optimizations (respectively.)

0.3

Significant changes relative to 0.2:

1. Solaris/x86 support

2. Added a JPEG quality slider to the Unix/Linux F8 popup menu in vncviewer

3. Patches from TightVNC 1.3dev7, including a great many usability improvements on the Windows viewer

4. Improved performance on broadband connections