Yes. Like most things in TurboVNC, the VeNCrypt feature was funded by a company that needed it, and since they use only the Java viewer, there was no funding to add that feature to the native viewer. I have an outstanding issue on GitHub for that:
https://github.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc/issues/8 but, so far, no one has stepped up to fund it. Since the Java viewer is readily available on Windows (it is installed alongside the native viewer), since it has a full-featured SSH client and GnuTLS functionality built in, and since the only real downside of it is that you have to install a JRE (both Java and native viewers should perform similarly), most people are content to use the Java viewer when they need encryption. However, you do not have to build TurboVNC under Cygwin in order to use -via and -tunnel with the native viewer. You simply have to do the following: 1. Install the Windows native TurboVNC Viewer using the binary installer we provide. 2. Install Cygwin. 3. Install the OpenSSH package within Cygwin. 4. Open a Windows Command Prompt. 5. Run "c:\Program Files\TurboVNC\cvncviewer.exe" [-tunnel|-via] {additional options} The TurboVNC Viewer will look for ssh.exe under c:\cygwin\bin by default, but you can change this by setting the VNC_TUNNEL_CMD and VNC_VIA_CMD environment variables (refer to https://cdn.rawgit.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc/master/doc/index.html#VNC_VIA_CMD for the structure of those variables.) Since MSYS2 is based on Cygwin, you can also install the OpenSSH package under MSYS2 and use that SSH client instead of Cygwin's, but you will have to modify VNC_VIA_CMD or VNC_TUNNEL_CMD accordingly, since MSYS2 installs ssh.exe under a different path. I personally prefer MSYS2, because it uses Pacman (from Arch Linux) to manage packages rather than Cygwin's clunky GUI interface, but Cygwin provides a broader set of packages. There is another outstanding issue to add GUI controls for the -via/-tunnel options to the Windows native viewer, as well as use libssh to provide an integrated SSH client without the need for Cygwin or MSYS2: https://github.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc/issues/6 That would make the Windows viewer operate more like the Java viewer and would add the "Security" tab to the Options Dialog. But again-- funding. If a feature or fix is in high demand, or if I feel it's something that is needed to move the project forward, then I will use General Fund money for it, but otherwise, I have to be careful not to give away so much free milk that no one will buy the cow. The above two features would likely pay my rent for 2-3 months. In the long term, I would also be open to developing a cross-platform native TurboVNC Viewer using one of the following approaches: (1) Porting the existing Windows viewer to some cross-platform toolkit (GTK or wxWidgets or Qt or whatnot.) I've always had a desire to do this, but it would be a fairly monumental undertaking, and since the hybrid Java+native viewer works well enough as a cross-platform viewer, there hasn't been a high demand for this feature. (2) Building upon the existing TigerVNC Viewer code to create a cross-platform native TurboVNC Viewer. However, there are a lot of problems with that code at the moment: (a) FLTK has a really poor look & feel, in my opinion. (b) FLTK is extremely slow on Mac, for unknown reasons (our Java viewer is something like 10x faster than TigerVNC's native viewer on Mac.) (c) It would require a great deal of GUI and behavioral modifications, and probably a few performance tweaks, to make it operate like the existing native TurboVNC Viewer. That's probably more detail than you needed, but I felt I should put those ideas out there in case other people reading this might have some interest in funding them. On 1/29/17 5:41 AM, Dieter Blaas wrote: > Hi, > > I have been using turbovnc very successfully for many years on > windows and ubuntu systems but now I need some security settings that do > not appear on the windows version - i.e. on the top of the GUI there is > 'Connection' and 'Globals' but no 'Security' setting. From reading the > documentation I understand that it needs ssh, which can be provided by > cygwin within windows. I have now tried to compile the source code > within cygwin but failed with a lot of error messages. Could anybody > please give me a hint as to how to install a turbovncviewer with the > security features (such as the -via tunneling) on Windows7?! > > Thank you very much, > > Dieter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ TurboVNC-Users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/turbovnc-users
