New GTK-VNC and work on OpenGL accelerated scaling

The new GTK-VNC 0.3.3 release was made available over the weekend. This was primarily a bug fix release dealing with yet more UltraVNC compatability issues, a few crash scenarios, improved key-state tracking to deal with annoying GTK behaviour where it fails to send you ‘release’ events during key-repeat, and ability to reset modifier state when the widget looses focus to avoid the server thinking Alt/Ctrl are stuck ‘on’.

We also have an EXPERIMENTAL web browser plugin for firefox. Before you go and install this, remember I’m saying this is EXPERIMENTAL. We’re not recommending anyone use this outside the lab yet because there needs to be a proper security audit of our protocol handling, and some more thought about how plugin security should work. Needless to say the build is disabled by default for now.

More interestingly though, is that the dev tree of GTK-VNC now has support for scaling the VNC display. We didn’t fancy writing pixmap scaling code, so for this we’re integrating with GtkGExt and OpenGL to get hardware accelerated scaling. The performance is pretty decent – Anthony tells me he’s been able to watch a DVD over VNC with scaling active. Sadly I’m stuck with the non-accelerated radeon driver in my laptop for now, so CPU usage is considerable. Still, its nice to be able to go “full screen” and have it use all screen real estate even when the remote desktop resolution doesn’t match the local desktop resolution.