Solaris 11 VNC Server is "blurry" or "smeared"

Posted by user12620111 on Oracle Blogs See other posts from Oracle Blogs or by user12620111
Published on Tue, 4 Dec 2012 18:24:48 +0000 Indexed on 2012/12/04 23:12 UTC
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I've been annoyed by quality of the image that is displayed by my VNC viewer when I visit a Solaris 11 VNC server. How should I describe the image? Blurry? Grainy? Smeared? Low resolution? Compressed? Badly encoded?

This is what I have gotten used to seeing on Solaris 11:

Solaris 11 Blurry VNC image

This is not a problem for me when I view Solaris 10 VNC servers. I've finally taken the time to investigate, and the solution is simple. On the VNC client, don't allow "Tight" encoding.

My VNC Viewer will negotiate to Tight encoding if it is available. When negotiating with the Solaris 10 VNC server, Tight is not a supported option, so the Solaris 10 server and my client will agree on ZRLE. 

Now that I have disabled Tight encoding on my VNC client, the Solaris 11 VNC Servers looks much better:

Solaris 11 crisp VNC image

How should I describe the display when my VNC client is forced to negotiate to ZRLE encoding with the Solaris 11 VNC Server? Crisp? Clear? Higher resolution? Using a lossless compression algorithm?

When I'm on a low bandwidth connection, I may re-enable Tight compression on my laptop. In the mean time, the ZRLE compression is sufficient for a coast-to-coast desktop, through the corporate firewall, encoded with VPN, through my ISP and onto my laptop. YMMV.

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