Hi all,
I installed vncserver on my desktop (Mandrake 10, Gnome and vnc-server 1.2.9) and vncviewer on my ancient laptop (Mandrake 9.2, IceWM, vnc-viewer 1.2.7 and 'property of Julius Ceasar' inscribed on the side). I run:
- 'vncserver -geometry 640x480 -depth 16' from a console on my desktop
the I proceed to run
- 'vncviewer 192.168.1.4:1' from a console on my laptop
I get the following prompt:
'VNC server supports protocol version 3.3 (viewer 3.3)'
- so far so good I guess
I then get prompted for a password and after giving that a window opens which is completely blue (the color of the ICEWM desktop, not to be confused with a certain error screen color of another os). An watch shaped cursor appears in the middle of this desktop and after that.....nothing happens.

If I start moving this cursor around I see the activity leds on my router blinking happily, so I guess I do have a remote connection, or at least I'm sending something over the network that stops when I stop moving the mouse. It would be nice of course to see the desktop (a cropped down version at least, the regular Gnome desktop on my main pc is 1280x1024 hence the geometry line in the server command).

Can anyone tell me if I'm doing something wrong and better yet, how to do it right.

Thanks in advance,
Merijn

I don't know if this is the problem, but vncserver doesn't know what desktop you usually use. In fact, I think it defaults to using twm, which is a horribly minimalist environment (and consistent with your description). Once you are "up and running" does anything happen when you right click? To change to Gnome, you need to edit the ~/.vnc/xstartup file. Somewhere in there you should see a command that starts a graphical environment (probably twm &). Just comment that out and add the gnome startup command.

Thanks for the reply Hangdog42,

I've checked out the xstartup file in ~/.vnc and it contains the following lines:
#!/bin/sh

# Mandrake Linux VNC session startup script
exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

So by the looks it, it executes xinitrc.

xinitrc contains the following code:
#!/bin/sh
# (c) 2000-2002 MandrakeSoft
# $Id: xinitrc-xinitrc,v 1.2 2002/09/10 05:53:43 flepied Exp $

# Set a background here because it's not done anymore
# in Xsesion for non root users
if [ "`whoami`" != root ]; then
xsetroot -solid "#21449C"
fi

exec /etc/X11/Xsession $*

So following up on this it would start Xsession, a rather long file which seems to start my x enviroment on the desktop.

I changed the 'exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc' line to 'exec gnome-session &' this produces a grey dotted screen with a big X cursor when I log in, so it's probably not quite the right way to go about it. I'll try finding a better (i.e. correct) way to start Gnome. Thanks for the info.

Update:
I think I figured out what is going wrong. Somehow Gnome doesn't seem to like working with vnc. The standard xstartup installed by mandrake states 'exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc' which I believe starts my Gnome enviroment. When I replace this line with 'exec gnome-session &' I get an error in the log stating "you're already running a session manager". If I replace this line with 'exec startkde &' I actually get a working vncserver I can connect to from another machine. Unfortunately some other functionality seems to be broken, but ah well, fixing that should keep me off the streets for another week or so

BTW if anyone has a way to start a remote Gnome session using tightvnc, I would be very glad to hear it.