ok... fudge it... i upgraded KDE to 3.5 and vnc works now with one caveat.. i use graphical login... is there anyway to have the vncserver running be login so i can see and use the graphical login?

I run VNC everyday here at work. They block all VNC ports so I just tunnel everything using putty thru port 22 ssh since its not blocked. I port forward like so, 192.168.1.101:5901 to 5901 (local) works like a champ. Anyways back to the question. The first time I issued vncserver :1 under my ID in linux the session loaded I VNC'd in real quick and saw the logging in process and I never had to come to anything but the desktop with saved applications up again unless for some odd reason the box needed restarted or if I would issue a vncserver -kill :1 I'm not sure if you can get to a graphical login screen with vnc. I'm pretty sure whichever user ID your under when you issue vncserver :# is what user that session is under. I know you can make changes to .vnc/startup (which I had to do because it wouldn't even go into a desktop at first till I issued startkde &), but long story short I'm not sure :O)

vnc will have to be loaded before kdm, but after X. I use the auto-login feature of gdm and x11vnc, so I can't give you much advice about kdm.

Somewhere in /etc/X11/kdm/ will be a pre-session startup file, you should be able to put the x11vnc startup command in there. Alternatively you can edit /etc/rc.d/rc.4 and add the startup command at the beginning of that. I can't vouch for either functionality, tho' =/

- Piete.

I installed slackware 10.2
then i installed nxclient (nomachine) client
it displayed a list of libraries and also mentioned 'sh shell' althouh i was using the sh shell and other libraries were there > I was unable to installed it?
Can somone tell me what was the real problem

I use the same setup as most of the people here:

1) x11vnc (installed from source from the website - some of the packages available for this are just ancient)
2) a small script to run it:

#!/bin/sh
AUTHTAG=`ps wwaux |grep auth |grep X11R6 |sed s/.*xauth.//`
x11vnc -rfbauth /etc/x11vnc.passwd -display :0 --forever -bg -localhost -shared -auth /var/run/xauth/$AUTHTAG

This shares the X screen out to VNC (put a decent password in the x11vnc.passwd using the -storepasswd option to x11vnc). This makes VNC push the data out only to localhost and also requires the password you set to access it.

3) Use putty with a port-forwarding rule on port 5900 to access it.

From work, I log in from SSH, run a VNC viewer and connect to "localhost" (as the port is forwarded through ssh to the remote computer).

This allows me to keep the same desktop from home or work, i.e. I can leave things like Opera running in order to pick up email, leave web pages open between sessions, have graphical programs running in the background, etc.

It took a bit of fiddling to get it working but it works just fine. It also ignores things like logins, which window manager etc. and "just works". Personally I have the script installed and just run it manually through the ssh session but you could also have it activated on boot (by putting it in xinitrc or something like ~/.kde/Autostart/ )

I was very wary of security issues with things like this (you are, after all, potentially sharing out your account access to the world if you configure it incorrectly). This should be safe because:

1) You can only access from the local machine (i.e. only people who can get physical or login access to your machine can see the VNC data)

2) Remotely, you have to have SSH access to make it work.

3) All the VNC data (including the usually-plain-text password) is encrypted through SSH.

4) The user running the X display is the only one allowed to open it and share it via x11vnc.

5) The VNC session is passworded so even local users can't just connect to it.

6) If your permissions are correct on the x11vnc.passwd file, nobody but those allowed can find out the vnc password.

I would be interested, however, if anyone has any further comments on possible security holes (assume that local users have no permissions to sniff the raw VNC session).

My Slackware 9.1/Windows XP Pro setup works like this:

On the slackware side I boot to runlevel 4 with KDM as my chooser. I've modified the appropriate files in /opt/kde/... to offer the graphical login to the network (a home lan) and to allow users to log in, but not root.

On the XP side I downloaded and installed Cygwin with the X11 packages. (I read the Mock-Mainframe howto to get all this working, BTW.) Now all I had to do was start a cygwin bash shell and then type 'x -terminate -query hostname' where hostname is the name of my slackware box. Poof! Full screen kdm login goodness.

In the spirit of play I then downloaded the cygwin openssh package(s). I created a key pair and put the public one on the slackware machine. A little fiddling about and it worked. I created a windows xp desktop link to cygwin's startxwin.bat. I click on that an get an x-term. I type 'ssh -Y user@hostname' and get the shell connected to the linux box. Then I can type, for instance, 'konqueror &' and the konqueror screen from my linux box opens on the windows box. 'gkrellm &' opens on the windows box but runs on slackware, too. Nice.

I also downloaded putty and turned on X11 forwarding with the MIT magic cookie option. Now if I run 'startxwin.bat' on the xp box and start putty to my slackware box with port forwarding enabled I log in to slackware over the putty connection and any program I run from that command line opens its window on the xp box just like with cygwin.

I haven't tried vnc, and probably won't since it isn't as capable as X. I do need to get the ssh stuff a little more secure and then I can open a port on my router and connect from work to my home network and impress my programmer buddies.

Of course, they do COBOL, VB, VC++, and C#. They're easily impressed. ;v)

That's it for my comment.