I have 3 boxes, 2 running Fedora 1 and the 3rd running Fedora 2. I am having trouble using vncviewer to and from any of these boxes. All these boxes are on the same network with no firewalls running ( they can all ping each other ), I run vncserver on one box with ip 172.20.100.100 and from another I type vncviewer 172.20.100.100:1 and I get "vncviewer: unable to open display "" " I am logged in as root but I have tried this with other accounts and I get the same result. Can someone Help????

You're pointing at the wrong port. Try 172.20.100.100:5901 instead of 172.20.100.100:1.

Let me know if that doesn't work.

Peace,
JImBass

Same result :-(

It would seem to me that the vncserver you setup isn't running or isn't listening on display :1 with that error message. Have you checked to ensure it is running and have you tried by hostname or tried without specifying the hostname/IP so it prompts you for it?

And the port is default, the :1 is the display on the server. I would try by just running:

vncviewer

At the terminal and let it prompt for the hostname/IP and then try putting in 172.20.100.100:1 to connect, after you've double checked to make sure the server is running.on display 1.

Cheers.

I have just tried "vncviewer" and it didn't prompt for anything, although I got the same old "vncviewer: unable to open display "" ".

I always run vnc vierwer with the command:
[jim@jimb jim]$ vncviewer &

If that gives you an error before asking for a hostname or IP address, then vncviewer isn't isnstalled correctly.

Everything TrickyKid said was true as well. You may want to try ps -ef|grep vnc* and see what vnc services are running.

Peace,
JimBass

I tried ps -ef |grep vnc* and I got "root 2207 1925 0 01:16 tty1 00:00:00 grep vnc*" I'm to new to this to know what that means. If vnc is not installed properly how can I fix it?

I'm assuming you can run vncviewer at runlevel 3!!!

vncviewer needs X to run, it won't work in the console.

ooops!!!!!!
you learn something every day!!!!! 5 or 6 in my case!!!! Sorry guys, thanks for the responses though!!!

That output means that no vnc service is running on that machine. I'm sorry that I failed to specify that for you - run that command on the box that you think vncserver is running on, 172.20.100.100. If you get just that result back, then vnc isn't running. Even when installed during the Fedora install, VNC has been very balky about starting itself. I use runlevel 3 as well, and to get vnc to start anytime I start the system, I had to run the chkconfig command as root, add the vncserver service, then specify it to start in runlevels 3, 4, and 5.

If VNC isn't installed correctly, I would uninstall it and reinstall. To uninstall, use the command:
rpm -qa|grep vnc*

and then when it lists the installed packages, do:
rpm -e [package name]

You can get the rpms to install vnc from realvnc.com

Also, one of the first things you should check is the log files from vnc. They will tell you if there is a problem that is stopping the service. If you're missing a dependency or library that vnc needs, then uninstalling and reinstalling won't work. Find your vnc log, and see what it says. Also, if you have numbers higher than 1 at the end of your log files (mine are in /home/jim/.vnc/, but I installed from rpms. My log files are named jimb.2303L:1 and jimb.2303l:2. If you have 2, 3, or any higher number at the end, that should be the last digit of your vncviewer call. If you haven't rebooted your system, or restarted vncserver, and the highest number at the end of the logfile's name is 3, then you should do vncviewer 172.20.100.100:5903.

Peace,
JimBass

*****I hadn't even considered that you weren't running X. I boot into runlevel 3, then startx. If you just need a way into the console, ssh is much much easier to get going.

Probably, I should have included those links in my post, but I’m glad you posted them. I have tried these VNC implementations myself, they work very well and they certainly have advantages over the original VNC. I wrote this small article because VNC is what comes with the Fedora installation media, so this is the new user’s first acquaintance with remote computing.

Norman Rasmussen:
Your VNC Session Manager sounds very nice! I’ll give it a try in the next days.

Bogdan Mustiata:
Right! I too believe that the NX technology is the future in remote computing. Less consumed bandwidth, native encryption support etc.

This is old, so you probably don't need to know the answer to this, but the result you received was showing you the only process it found with vnc* was your grep command you just ran. This indicated that you did not have the vncserver running. If it were running you would have returned your grep line above and something starting with the following in the last column of your result.

In order to access remote system using VNCviewer, you first need to setup VNC server on anyone of those machines. Did you..?

After setting it up, you will need to create VNC ports (or also called display) for users who are on other different machines and wish to access GUI display of that VNC server. Then only those user's will be able to connect to remote VNC server.

Simply using hostname or IP followed by 1 or any random number in VNCviewer won't help you.

To generate a VNC port, use vncserver command.