Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Digital Cameras & Shooting Techniques => Topic started by: scrinch on June 07, 2008, 07:43:23 am

Title: Laptop monitor connection to tower computer?
Post by: scrinch on June 07, 2008, 07:43:23 am
Before sounding too crazy let me explain.  I just bought a second Mac G4 Tower to use as a processor for printing my images while on the road in my camper.  All of my color work is done on my at home G4 so I just need a monitor to see and line up images for the printer.  I have several lap tops.  An older G3 and a G4 and was wondering if there is anyway to use their displays as a monitor?
Title: Laptop monitor connection to tower computer?
Post by: Jeremy Roussak on June 07, 2008, 01:06:16 pm
Quote
Before sounding too crazy let me explain.  I just bought a second Mac G4 Tower to use as a processor for printing my images while on the road in my camper.  All of my color work is done on my at home G4 so I just need a monitor to see and line up images for the printer.  I have several lap tops.  An older G3 and a G4 and was wondering if there is anyway to use their displays as a monitor?
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I doubt it's possible to do exactly what you want. However, if you're running Leopard, you could try connecting the two machines (Ethernet or perhaps Firewire) and using Back to my Mac to get at the desktop machine's imaginary monitor. I've idea whether it will work (the desktop might get upset that it has no real monitor), but it's worth a try.

Jeremy
Title: Laptop monitor connection to tower computer?
Post by: francois on June 08, 2008, 12:05:52 pm
You won't be able to use your laptop's monitor with your G4 tower. However, as Jeremy suggested above, you can use your G3 or G4 with VNC or Timbuktu to have an indirect view of your G4 tower. You have to connect your Macs (laptop and tower) with either a FireWire or Ethernet cable.
Title: Laptop monitor connection to tower computer?
Post by: ravishankarr on June 08, 2008, 03:14:47 pm
Assuming you're on 10.4 (tiger) on both tower and laptop:

You could use VNC Server (aka Apple Remote Desktop) on the mac g4 tower and run VNC Client (Chicken of the VNC aka CotVNC) on your laptop to achieve this.

Example of setting up VNC Server:

http://www.dssw.co.uk/blog/2007/05/14/a-vn...n-mac-os-x-104/ (http://www.dssw.co.uk/blog/2007/05/14/a-vnc-server-is-included-in-mac-os-x-104/)

Chicken of the VNC can be found here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/ (http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/)

It is simple to run the software and connect to tower from laptop.

In 10.5, this has been renamed to Screen Sharing (System Preferences -> Sharing -> Screen Sharing) and the client is integrated into finder window.

Your big issue will be to start screen sharing for which you will need a monitor :-) Perhaps you could borrow one? Hope this helps!
-Ravi
Title: Laptop monitor connection to tower computer?
Post by: francois on June 08, 2008, 03:20:29 pm
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…Your big issue will be to start screen sharing for which you will need a monitor :-) Perhaps you could borrow one? Hope this helps!
-Ravi
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Start-up the laptop with the tower as the boot drive (in target mode, connected via FireWire) and set-up screen sharing. This should do the trick.