I’ve been a fan of VNC for a long time. With a mix of ssh, VNC, and port forwarding, its relatively easy to securely access any computer from anywhere.

So, I’ve got a server box running Ubuntu. I hardly ever sit in from of it to do anything. Usually, I just tunnel in from my laptop and do whatever I need to do on the server.

Now and then, I’d try to use VNC to access the desktop on the server, using the Terminal Server Client, which is basically a front-end for rdesktop and VNC. The resolution on the server was a lot higher than my laptop. Scrollbars would show up on my laptop VNC window. As expected, the default behavior when opening up the VNC window was the vertical scrollbar was at the top and horizontal scroll bar was all the way to the left. I would always left mouse click on the scrollbars to move down or right. And then I would try to left mouse click to move back the other direction, but it would never work! Frustrated, I would close the window and open up another VNC window.

After a bit of googling, I found out that the VNC version I had, 3.3.17, used some old X scrollbars which behaved differently. Left clicking on the scrollbar will move you down or right. But to go up or left, right click on the scrollbars! Its obvious and does make sense, but its not the way scrollbars work anymore.

Apparently, VNC 4.x supports the “normal” scrollbars. For Ubuntu, VNC 4.x is available in the universe repositories.

Either way, this was minor pet peeve of mine and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it anymore.