vnc and xbuntu issues.....
 

Hi, I'm trying so set up vnc on my xbuntu box, and log in from my kubuntu box. I can get it started just fine. 2 problems. First, I have no desktop. Just a grey box with a terminal window, with a curser. I can do whatever with the terminal, but I can't do ordinary desktop stuff to that box, which is sort of the point. Which brings me to the second problem, the vnc display I do have isn't the same thing that's on the screen of the box I'm running the vnc server on. I want to use vnc to start and stop programs (movies and music mostly, and some admin). In otherwords, I want to start a movie to be viewed on the local(media) machine, (the movies are on the local machine too.), but I want to start and stop the movie from the remote machine(the one I'm sitting at). I use ssh to get to the media box, and start vnc from there. All's well to that point. Then I start vncviewer from the computer I'm at. It seems to work, except it isn't the desktop being shown, it's not even really a desktop, it certainly isn't xfce.

The commands I use to start vnc might matter, so here it is.

From the media box

$ vncserver :2 -geometry 800x600 -depth 24

Then from the machine I'm sitting at....

$ vncviewer 192.168.1.100:2

So, can anyone point me at what I'm missing ? I've googled a bit, and searched here, and I've found a few mentions about enabling something in gdm, but I'm using xbuntu, which I'm not even sure it uses gdm. (xdm isn't it ?) Anyway, I don't know what I'm doing wrong, and I don't even know in which direction to start looking...

Thanks much...sorry if I've been confusing...

David

Hi

I set up a similar thing some time ago, and was confused too. First I tried to install vncserver, and when starting it, without the ":2", it complained something about something being in use. So I added something like ":2" to the vncserver, and got results like you explained.

It turned out, I already had a vncserver running, but it was configured to not allow any connections. That's why it was in use, and I couldn't control the regular desktop with a new vncserver. The solution was to look in the menus in Gnome for something called Remote Desktop, and checking a box called "allow remote computers to connect to this one" or something.

Note I use regular Ubuntu, not Xubuntu, but I think they are similar. I can't really remember what I did, and I'm not home now. But I wouldn't be suprised if you found something similar with Xubuntu.

You can also install and use x11vnc:

cheers,