Previously working vnc... no longer working
 

I have a system running beautifully with SuSE 9.0. During the install the system asks whether or not I would like to enable VNC, which I have done. From then on out I was able to connect to my VNC server via any java enabled browser on port 5810.

For some reason it has abruptly stopped working. When I try and connect I get the password screen (which never required any sort of valid password to begin with... but that's another question) at which point I hit enter and see nothing other than an X cursor and the black and white chain looking X background. (When it was working it would automatically load KDM)

Where do I begin to look for what the problem may be?


Thanks,
Steve

It sounds a little like your ~/.vnc/xstartup file isn't quite kosher. Usually when people complain about not getting their normal X environment, the xstartup file is the culprit. The other thing to check into is who the owner of the Xvnc process is. What I'm wondering is if somehow vncserver is now being started under a different user. For example, if vncserver used to be started by root (a bad idea by the way) and is now being started by marsonist, it could be that vncserver has lost track of the xstartup file it used to use.

The other thing to check would be your error logs. I think that vnc keeps a log in the ~/.vnc directory (I may be wrong about that though). Also check your system and message logs and see if anything there looks interesting.