I have Debian "Testing" installed on a Buffalo Linkstation (ppc based, headless computer).

I have a vnc server running on it providing a remote desktop that I can log into from a "real" computer.

As long as I start the vncserver as user "root", everything works great.

But if I start it as a "normal" user, things like terminal programs won't start and I get an error like this:

Eterm: Error: Can't open slave tty /dev/pts/1 -- Permission denied

reported in the ~/.vnc log file.

I'm only mounting the devpts file system, I'm not using devfs. Any ideas about how to troubleshoot this?

Looks like a simple permissions problem. try this command:

That'll give everybody on the system read/write access to /dev/pts/1, and things should work fine

HTH

Thanks, that fixed it.

I don't know why I didn't think of it.