Desktop Sharing
 

Hey all,
I need to use Linux to do some programming work for my college classes and I have Mandrake 9.1 installed on my laptop. I am trying to setup a desktop sharing program called Virtual Network Computing by running the server in Linux on my laptop and the viewer in Windows XP on my desktop. I am doing this because I have had bad experiences letting Linux mess with partitions on the same hard drive that windows is installed on so I do not really want to install Linux on my desktop. The problem I am having is that I cannot connect to the server that is running on my laptop. I think this is probably because the required port is not open on my router. I guess my question is, how do I figure out what port needs to be open and how do I open it? I have this problem fixed on my desktop by running a program called PortMagic which automatically opens ports as needed but there is no version of this for linux. Can anyone help me out here?

After I put up that original post I did some thinking and realized that since I am accessing the VNC server from a computer that is on the same network as the computer I am trying to access it from, it shouldn't matter that the port on my router isn't open.

I then realized that I was not accessing the correct IP address and found another post on VNC which suggested specifying the geometry argument and the monitor argument when starting the VNC server which I did and the server is now working and I am able to connect to it.

Now I need to switch from the default window manager that is used by VNC to KDE. I am a newb to linux so I am not sure what the command would be in my xstartup file in the .vnc/ directory to do this. Could someone give me a line that might work?

OK, now I have it so that KDE starts up instead of whatever that crappy default window manager was. Now I need to know how I can get KDE to load in vnc exactly the same stuff it loads in my regular linux login. For instance, when I connect to the VNCserver using the viewer, all I see is an xterm window and the taskbar and such are not there. How do I go about getting these things to load as well?