VNC

I needed a way to get to the desktop of my Ubuntu 10.04 system from my openSuse 11.4 laptop via VNC. To get a jumpstart on this, I searched the web and found a nice outline of what to do at http://theseekersquill.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/vnc-server-ubuntu-windows/.

I already had vnc4server installed, so I started with step 3 which is to run vncpasswd to establish a password for the VNC connect. The first time I did this, I ran it as sudo and it didn't work so I had to go and delete the generated password file and do it again as my user account.

Next, I edited ~/.vnc/xstartup in vim. By default, 10.04 has the following lines commented out:

#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
sh /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

So I uncommented them and left the rest of the file alone. That didn't work. Connecting via KRDC gave me a blank blue screen. So, I edited the file so that it contained just the lines above and I tried to connect and got through, but got a gray screen with nothing on it except a cursor with an X. Progress!

Digging into the log, I noticed that there was a permissions problem calling xintitrc. So, I ran
chmod +x /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, killed the server and tried again. This time it worked and all is well in linuxland.