Somebody please help me. I am going insane with this one and have been up for two nights trying to resolve it.

I have a Windows XP machine (service pack 1a) from which I am trying to VNC to a Red Hat Linux 9 machine using tight VNC.

I can VNC from the Linux machine to the Windows machine with no effort at all and to be honest I would leave the setup like that except it would cause big problems for others in my house that are not aware of the greatness of Linux.

So I am trying to VNC form the XP machine to the Linux machine.

Again the connection worked straight away, however all I got was a grey screen with a terminal window (which accepted commands and worked).
However I want to be able to use a Gnome desktop so I edited my xstartup file with the line:

exec gnome-session

Killed vncserver and started it again. Went back to windows machine and still only got the grey screen etc.

I have trawled the web for two nights and tried everything but still cannot get a Gnome desktop when I VNC in.

Can anybody help.......please.........

have you set up the desktop that VNC looks at? gnome has many desktops. you can have the vnc client using one desktop while some one else can use a desktop on the computers moniter.
dunno if that helps but windows only has one desktop unless you are using an alternative shell so that might be why it can connect to the XP desktop.

have fun.

Thanks caged that could be it, how can I check the desktop is set up?

cant really remember i guess i can recommend google if nobody else jumps in
you may have to assign different ports to each dektop and connect to the linux machine specifiing a port number eg: 192.168.0.1:500 or gnomecomputer:500.

gnome-session is probably not happy running within a vnc server as it's presumably already running on your local connection... resource conflicts and such like occur. try just running a minimal window manager, "exec twm" to test you are actually getting something. or just try to load anythign without even having a window manager, with just "xterm" in xstartup or something.

I couldn't really get the VNC stuff that came with red hat to work correctly either. If you go to www.realvnc.com and download their tar.gz and install it, it works much better. Once you install the server from them, simply log in as the user you would like to vnc as and run vncserver at the command line. This will start a vncserver for that user. It will also tell you what desktop number that server is. Then when you start vnc from your xp machine enter the server name or IP address followed by ":1" without the qotes and assuming that your desktop number is 1. You can read about all this on the realvnc site. It works really well because you can have a number of vnc servers running at once.

I can SSH to my linux box at home and then log in as myself and start one server then I SU to another user and start a second server and then SU to root and start a third. Then I can vnc to patshouse:1 or patshouse:2 or patshouse:3. I use desktop 1 for my work, desktop 2 for screwing around with windows managers so I don't mess up my main desktop and desktop 3 for root access. Actually I don't really use the root access that much since I do most of that work through SSH.

Another neat feature of the latest server is that you can http to it on port 5801, 5802, 5803 etc. depending on desktop number, and view your desktop from a web page.

Sorry about the wordy post.

Thanks for all you help guys, I managed to get it working last night. The problem seemed to be due to running vncserver from a terminal window in Gnome. If I booted to a coomand line and run it from there using the line 'exec gnome-session' in xstartup everythin worked fine.

I even now have a script that runs vncserver at bootup.

All I need now is a way to shut down the machine safely remotely and I will be able to run it with nothing more than a power lead and a network cable attached, which was my goal.

Anyone have any ideas?

I shut mine down on the command line with "shutdown now" you can use the -r switch to reboot after shutdown. I have never tried it from a terminal window through vnc though. I always telnet in for command line work. Telnet or SSH if you are coming in from outside your network are great backups. That's also how I can start separate VNC sessions. I always start a second vnc session using a second user when I want to play around with different desktops etc. I don't mess up main one until I know what I'm doing. . . . Then I mess up my main one.