New GTK-VNC release 0.3.2

Things have been progressing well with the GTK-VNC widget. The 0.3.0 release a few weeks back fixed a couple of co-routine race conditions, fixed portability to Solaris and added compatability for UltraVNC brokenness – it claims support for RFB version 3.4 which doesn’t technically exist. 0.3.1 was a brown paper bag release a day later, due to the ‘make dist’ process going wrong with 0.3.0; say no more. Today Anthony released version 0.3.2 which adds a GThread based co-routine implementation to provide portability to platforms lacking ucontext support (yes I’m looking at you Windows/cygwin). It also adds support for the RRE server encoding which is a zlib compressed format, although not commonly used its in the spec so its worth supporting.

For the next releases we’ll have support for the Tight encoding as used by TightVNC – this is a more advanced variant on RRE, in some cases using JPEG as its compression method which is interesting. We’re also in communication with the VMWare team to see if we can write code to support the RFB extensions, for which they recently got official extension numbers assigned. We decided to apply the ‘release early, release often’ mentality with earnest, and thus we’re aiming to have regular monthly releases for the forseeable future. Meanwhile John is continuing to develop Vinagre, a long overdue modern VNC client taking full advantage of the GNOME infrastructure & desktop integration points.