Problems With Vinagre
26 Jul 2008
So, the default remote desktop app in Ubuntu changed from, um, I don’t
know what actually, to a new app called “Vinagre”.
You’d think that’d be something I wouldn’t give a patooty
about. The first thing you notice is that it has a list on the side that lets
you keep track of servers you connect to which seemed nice enough.
I didn’t use it much at first, so I thought nothing more about it.
Today, I started using it. Dear god:
- Tried to connect to a fully up-to-date Fedora box (from a fully up-to-date
Ubuntu). vino-server crashes on the Fedora machine. I don’t know
who’s fault it is, but I don’t really care. Working around that
by using XDMCP for the time being, but that’s pretty irritating,
interface-wise.
- While repeatedly trying to connect to the Fedora box (it silently fails on
the Ubuntu machine), Vinagre doesn’t save the last-entered machine
name, so I have to keep entering “192.168.0….” every time.
Irritating.
- Insanely hard to send Ctrl-Alt-Del to log into Windows machines. For same
reason, Ctrl-Alt was chosen as the “Capture/Release” input. So,
in order to send Ctrl-Alt-Del to login to a Windows box, you have to first
focus the Viagre app (click/whatever), then make sure you’ve
uncaptured the input by doing Ctrl-Alt, then finally, recapture
the input by doing Ctrl-Alt again, and then without letting go of
Ctrl-Alt, press Del to get the final combo. If you just push that combo of
course, the Ctrl-Alt first removes capture, and then sends Ctrl-Alt-Del to
the local machine. Not very intuitive, especially since there’s very
little (no?) indication of whether input is captured.
- Related, there seems to be absolutely no way to send F11 to the client
machine. The general hotkey behaviour is irritating enough as it is: Alt-F4
closes either all of Vinagre, or an app on the client, depending on whether
you’ve pressed Ctrl-Alt recently, with no indication of which
“mode” you’re in). But, it seems that F11 is even worse.
If you’re in captured mode, then most things seem to be sent to the
target machien, but apparently F11 was deemed too important to be handled
normally, and there’s no configuration mechanism. Fine, until I try to
debug something and naturally hit F11 to “Step Into” a function.
Update When input is captured, there’s no way to scroll the virtual
desktop if it’s bigger than your current monitor. WTF?
Basically, it just seems like this app was pushed out way too quick to the
main/default user stream. Please give me back my old VNC/RDP viewer. :(