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Lion screen sharing: virtual display broken

nsayer

nsayer

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 23, 2003
1,273
788
Silicon Valley
When I use screen sharing to connect to any of the Lion machines I have upgraded, switching to the virtual display seemingly works, but the physical display shows the Beach Ball of Despair and is basically non-functional. I can sometimes recover by switching back to the hardware display, but frequently this fails as well and requires power-cycling to recover.

Has anyone gotten this feature to work properly?
 
nsayer said:
When I use screen sharing to connect to any of the Lion machines I have upgraded, switching to the virtual display seemingly works, but the physical display shows the Beach Ball of Despair and is basically non-functional. I can sometimes recover by switching back to the hardware display, but frequently this fails as well and requires power-cycling to recover.

Has anyone gotten this feature to work properly?
Click to expand...

works perfectly for me....maybe you need to reinstall the OS....sounds like something got corrupt.
 
I could sort of believe something might have gotten corrupted on one machine, but on five?

There must be something else that they have in common that needs fixing.
 
I'm having the same issue. Screen sharing works fine, but when I try to use a virtual display mode the physical screen freezes up. When I disconnect from screen sharing, the computer I was connecting to (2010 mac mini) typically logs out and then freezes. Anyone else?
 
I've noticed that it does something freakishly odd I've never seen before. It actually freezes the spinning of the Beach Ball of Despair, but the ball still moves with mouse movement. It's the weirdest thing.
 
Well, from what I can tell, you and I and one other person have won the "**** you" lottery. No one else on the planet appears to have this problem, from what I can tell hunting around here and the various other fora and googling for a solution.

No soup for us.
 
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nsayer said:
Seriously? I'm the only person in God's creation having this problem?
Click to expand...

I am also have the same problem! :eek:

I have done clean installs of lion on BOTH mac and still have the same problem! :mad:

Hoping 10.7.1 / 10.7.2 fixes the problem!


I am connecting to a Mac mini (2007 from my MBP 2011)

Pressing the power button and putting the Mini to sleep is the only way of fixing it!
 
nsayer said:
So sleep-wake will recover the beach-balled hardware console? I'll have to try that. I've been hard-power-cycling them to get them back.
Click to expand...

Thats working for me, would be interesting to know if it works for you too!
 
You're not the only one having this problem :cool:

In fact, it's quite easy to replicate - open Safari on the main display, go to apple.com and start playing a video/ad on there. Screen share to that machine from another Mac running Lion and choose to connect to the virtual display. You'll soon see the video on the main display freeze. Notice that if you mouse over Safari's dock icon, the video resumes. Same thing happens with Flash videos.

XBMC users report this: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=106068
Plex users report this: http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/28446-plex-with-lion-screen-sharing/

It's a pretty serious bug, IMO. I'd encourage everyone to submit feedback to Apple on it, and hopefully it will be fixed in a future update.
 
rezonat0r said:
You're not the only one having this problem :cool:

In fact, it's quite easy to replicate - open Safari on the main display, go to apple.com and start playing a video/ad on there. Screen share to that machine from another Mac running Lion and choose to connect to the virtual display. You'll soon see the video on the main display freeze. Notice that if you mouse over Safari's dock icon, the video resumes. Same thing happens with Flash videos.

XBMC users report this: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=106068
Plex users report this: http://forums.plexapp.com/index.php/topic/28446-plex-with-lion-screen-sharing/

It's a pretty serious bug, IMO. I'd encourage everyone to submit feedback to Apple on it, and hopefully it will be fixed in a future update.
Click to expand...

Same issue here on a Mac Mini Server 2011. I've reformatted the disk and installed Lion over the internet to be certain everything is clean. You cannot play video on the active account then connect to the virtual display. It freezes on my MacBook Pro with 10.7.1 as well. Audio continues playing. If you move the window, the video will fast forward. This feature is kind of useless. I had better results when I could fire up Vine Server in each account and log in using RealVNC client. Since Apple made so many changes, Vine is no longer compatible. If I could install Snow Leopard on my Mini, I wouldn't hesitate.

----------
DaffyDuck said:
Same issue here on a Mac Mini Server 2011. I've reformatted the disk and installed Lion over the internet to be certain everything is clean. You cannot play video on the active account then connect to the virtual display. It freezes on my MacBook Pro with 10.7.1 as well. Audio continues playing. If you move the window, the video will fast forward. This feature is kind of useless. I had better results when I could fire up Vine Server in each account and log in using RealVNC client. Since Apple made so many changes, Vine is no longer compatible. If I could install Snow Leopard on my Mini, I wouldn't hesitate.
Click to expand...

Just after posting this, I discovered that there is new version of Vine Server. I tried it out, and the video still freezes when accessing the inactive account.
 
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DaffyDuck said:
Just after posting this, I discovered that there is new version of Vine Server. I tried it out, and the video still freezes when accessing the inactive account.
Click to expand...

Good to know. I have to believe Apple is aware of this; I noticed it within about five minutes on the new mini. Anyone claiming to not experience this problem either has not done the test above, or is using older hardware, and therefore probably different drivers. It would make sense if the issue is indeed related to the graphics drivers used by the new systems. As it stands, both the Intel and AMD GPU flavors of the new mini have this issue.
 
Try killing the SecurityAgent

I find killing the security agent resolves the problem of the login screen freezing
 
Maybe Plex/XMBC Issue?

I'm having the same issue with a 2011 MBA and Mini. I noticed that there are accounts of this happening with XMBC and Plex users. Is that the common thread? I do have a Plex Server running on the Mac Mini.
 
hammie14 said:
I am also have the same problem! :eek:

I have done clean installs of lion on BOTH mac and still have the same problem! :mad:

Hoping 10.7.1 / 10.7.2 fixes the problem!


I am connecting to a Mac mini (2007 from my MBP 2011)

Pressing the power button and putting the Mini to sleep is the only way of fixing it!
Click to expand...

I am also having an issue with Screen Sharing where I need to put the Mac-Mini to sleep to recover. I have an active open case with Apple on this. The engineers have reported back that there is a fix for this coming in 10.7.4. What I found was the issue, in my case, had to do with have an external HD hooked to my Mac-Mini. If I removed the external HD from the Mac-Mini the issue does not happen. I have sent a lot of information to Apple about this to help them diagnose the issue.

I have my Mac-Mini hooked to a 50" Plasma TV with no keyboard or mouse. All I use is the Apple remote to control it. It is used exclusively as a media center to play DVDs, etc. Another issue that I have encountered is if the TV is off and I file share to the Mac-Mini and then turn on the TV, no video is seen on the TV. I then have to attempt to either VNC or screen share to the Mac-Mini before any video is seen on the TV. This I also reported to Apple. Whether this will be fixed in 10.7.4 is not clear to me.
 
I have been playing around with screen sharing after 10.7.4 and it looks like Apple has fixed a lot of things. I can now login in as myself over screen sharing and then switch to another user and log that user out without having the beach ball issue. I need to play around with screen sharing more but it looks good so far.
 
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Yup, screen sharing is improved for me in 10.7.4 also.

Problems i used to have with 10.7.x:

- connect, screen doesn't draw everything properly unless you click on areas of it
- screen just plain didn't update properly, graphical glitches, etc


neither of the above happen for me now, it is pretty much perfect - animations slow over the network of course, but that is to be expected. i'm happy :)
 
Just an update. I have been playing around with screen sharing/file sharing more and there are some things which are still broken in 10.7.4:

  • Let my Mac-Mini go into a deep sleep (> 2 hrs), file share to it, mount one of its HD, turn on TV, no video signal. This issue existed before 10.7.4.
  • Let my Mac-Mini go into a deep sleep (> 2 hrs), plug a external HD into one of its USB ports, attempt to screen share to Mac-Mini, screen sharing will not bring up a virual display as it gets stuck in "connecting to".
  • When screen sharing, the menubar does not always show up on the virtual display. Have to click on the virtual display before the menubar is shown.
  • I have had this one happen two times now. Screen share to Mac-Mini as admin user. Fast user switch to standard user already logged in. Logout standard user. Log back in admin user. Virual display goes black. Have to close screen share and re-open screen share to clear black screen.
I am planning on sending a Quick Time screen movie of these problems to Apple. Fortunately, I still have an open case on this from pre-10.7.4.
 
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