Ion-2 and VNC

I use ion as my window manager, but have recently switched my home desktop from a G4 Cube to a PC running Solaris. I’m a regular full-screen VNC user, and getting vncviewer and ion to cooperate is pretty key. Fullscreen mode can be achieved using vncviewer and ion (from blastwave, or build them yourself) with only a few modifications to the X resources for vncviewer. These aren’t at all tricky, but require enough experimenting that writing them down will save someone somewhere five minutes some day.

Although the fullscreen transition will mostly work, ion will be confused about the keyboard focus, so we need to tell vncviewer to take additional responsibility. Add the following to your $HOME/.Xdefaults file:

vncviewer.grabKeyboard: true
vncviewer.fullScreen: true

For the latter case, you could instead use the -fullscreen option to vncviewer or the on-screen menu. That’s it: you’re immersed in a virtual reality… which for me is mostly the same as my normal reality.

Update (9 June): Five minutes saved already; see Comments.