I am trying to VNC to RHEL 4 ES, but can't get the desktop to come up. I keep getting a screen that has check boxes for viewer options, with a gray background.

The check boxes say "Accept clipboard from viewers", "Send clipboard to viewers" and "Send primary selection to viewers"

Do I need to install Gnome or something - or do I need to edit a config file? Thanks

do you have a window manager running on the remote host?

you need to go into ~/.vnc/xstartup (as the user you are VNCing in as) and add an entry into that load a desktop. For my server I use kde and use the following two lines. the xterm line may already exist, these two lines should appear as the last lines in the file I believe.

xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
startkde &

As a note, make sure if you are using VNC, you are doing so encrypted, most default to unencrypted which sends usernames and passwords in plain text. If you wish to test if you have gnome or KDE, while in the default view, you get a terminal, you can type startkde to test for kde or gnome-session to test for gnome. If neither work then you'll likely have to install one.

Thanks for the info!! - I SSH'd to the server and typed in gnome-session and got a command not found. I tried kdestart and got this:

startkde
xsetroot: unable to open display ''
xset: unable to open display ""
xset: unable to open display ""
xsetroot: unable to open display ''
startkde: Starting up...
ksplash: cannot connect to X server
kdeinit: Aborting. $DISPLAY is not set.
Warning: connect() failed: : No such file or directory
ksmserver: cannot connect to X server
startkde: Shutting down...
Warning: connect() failed: : No such file or directory
Error: Can't contact kdeinit!
startkde: Running shutdown scripts...
startkde: Done.

So it looks like kde is installed but not starting? Should I go ahead and edit .vnc/xstartup to have startkde - or should I try to install gnome

Ah, sounsd like you have KDE, I meant when you start a VNC session it should also bring up a terminal in the new session and if you type startkde into that it'll go and load kde for the session to test. Anyway you should be able to make the changes I stated above so you can get a proper interface on VNC. You will need to restart or start a session after the change, any sessions existing from before won't automatically update to the new configuration.

As for KDE vs. Gnome, which do you prefer? since you got KDE installed it sounds like the easier option tho.