I'm running both SuSE 8.2 and Redhat 9.0 on seperate machines and using the preinstalled VNC software.

When I connect to the redhat machine I get a full xwindows desktop display in 16 bit color and everything works wonderfully.

When I connect to the SuSE machine all I get is a bash shell window which doesn't make sense because I'd just connect via SSH if all I wanted was a commandline. I tried downloading and installing VNC just using the defaults to see if that would make it display properly but it rendered the same results.

Any ideas on what is configured differently or how I can configure it properly so I can connect to my SuSE gui desktop the same way I can connect to my redhat machine's gui desktop?

look in ~/.vnc and there should be an xstartup file..your redhat probably has it and your suse is missing it. Then just add it to suse machine.

They both have the xstartup file in ~/.vnc

Here's my redhat desktop via VNC
http://www.citationce.com/temp/redhatvnc.jpg

Here's my suse desktop via VNC
http://www.citationce.com/temp/susevnc.gif

oh I see now, xstartup is a script file and they're different in both redhat and suse. I just noticed that it was executable so I assumed it was like a windows binary executable file and that both xstartup files were the same in redhat and suse.

It appears the xstartup script is comparable to a windows batch file as opposed to a binary file and this is where I got confused. Excuse my linux newbishness.

I tried copying my xstartup file and all the files it links to from my redhat machine to my suse machine but it still gives me the same results :/

I got it working calling! Thank you for your suggestion bruce1271!

Here is what I did to make VNC work in SuSE 8.2 the same way it does in redhat 9.

I copied the following files from my redhat machine to my SuSE machine using the same directory structures:
/root/.vnc/xstartup
/root/.vnc/passwd
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc/Xclients
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc/xinitrc
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc/xinitrc.d

At this point it still wasn't working. I messed around with ita bit and looked through all the scripts to see if there was anything I was missing. Eventually I figured out what that the problem was I didn't add the proper permissions to the files. To rectify the problem I added the proper permissions to the files so it matched the file permissions on the redhat machine. (I didn't realize execute permissions don't get copied with the file. Coming from a windows background I usually forget about this step)

# chmod +rwx /root/.vnc/xstartup
# chmod +rw /root/.vnc/passwd
# chmod +rwx /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc/Xclients
# chmod +rwx /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc/xinitrc
# chmod +rwx /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc/xinitrc.d

To complete the setup I created a vnc startup script saved as vncserver.sh in my home directory with the following command line in it:

# vncserver :99 -name DoppersVNCserver -depth 16 -geometry 992x560

The command I specified also allows me to connect to my vnc server remotely through the the java client at http://dopperscomputer:5899/ It fits perfectly in my webbrowser window without having to scroll or resize windows when I run the client machine at 1024x768 resolution in 16 bit color in my mozilla webbrowser.