Macintosh Server Applications Software at The Mac Orchard

Vine Server

Open source; $0

Current Version: 3.11 (October 14, 2009)

Vine Server (also known as OSXvnc) is a native VNC server for OS X that allows you to view and interact with your Mac OS X desktop from another computer over a network. Vine Server is free software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Vine Server 3.11 includes the following enhancements:

Fixed a number of international keyboards that had a small number of keys not mapped (like i and ; in French.)
Fixed a compile level problem that caused a crash when using ZRLE encoding

An OS 9 version - called "OS9vnc" - is also available for download.

User Reviews

"I've been using OSXvnc on three OS X boxes that I'm using on servers. I have it installed to load automatically on start-up and it has been rock-solid and surprisingly fast. There is only one major glitch -the cursor isn't an arrow; it is just a small dot. Nevertheless, I can maintain these servers remotely over the Internet. Terrific! Now if I could just find a really nice listserver instead of Majordomo for OS X..."
—Gordon Goodman

Submit another review!

Download the Mac OS X 10.3.9+ (Cocoa / Universal) version.

Also See . . .

Can't find what you're looking for? Try a search:

Also, if you have an older Mac, be sure to check out the "Classic" applications page for more options.

Finally, take a look at ALEMIA if you think you know that name of an application, but aren't quite sure.

Built Into Mac OS X

Mac OS X has a huge amount of TCP/IP-based server software built into it that I don't specifically cover here. Your "Sharing" Preference Pane allows you to enable and disable these services with a click of the mouse. The software running behind the scenes to provide many of these services is generally of the open source variety. The standard release of Mac OS X includes, among many others:

Apache httpd (web server; enabled via the Sharing Preference Pane).
Postfix (mail server; see Mac OS X Hints for more information).
tnftpd (FTP server; enabled via the Sharing Preference Pane).
OpenSSH (Secure Shell server; enabled via the Sharing Preference Pane via "Remote Login" but additionally configurable via selected applications listed on this page).
BIND (Domain Name System server; see Mac OS X Hints for more information).
Samba (Windows file sharing; enabled via the Sharing Preference Pane).
XFree86 (X Window server; enabled via the "X11" application in your "Utilities" folder, if you elected to install it with Mac OS X).

Of course, Mac OS X Server includes many more, in addition to offering more recent versions of many of the above servers.

Also Consider . . .

These are applications that are newer and of potential interest, but which I haven't yet selected for permanent inclusion. Have a look, and let me know if you think they deserve to be part of the permanent collection!