I recently bought myself a new laptop. Sometimes though, I want to check something on it on a rare occasion when I’ve not taken it with me. In comes VNC. Under Ubuntu 11.04, turning on VNC support is pretty straight forward.
To turn on VNC, go to the power icon in the top right corner (I think they call it the “Session Menu”, but it looks like a power button to me) and select “System Settings”. Under the “Internet and Network” heading, is an option called “Remote Desktop”. Click on that. Tick the top two boxes “Allow other users to view your desktop” and “Allow other users to control your desktop”. Tick the box “Require the user to enter this password” (and enter a password) and “Configure network automatically to accept connections”. Untick “You must confirm each access to this machine” and select “Only display an icon when there is someone connected”. Close it.
Now, try connecting to your device, and see what happens. I had some issues with Compiz elements not rendering correctly, and found a few hints to fix it. The first says to turn on the “disable_xdamage” option. It says to use gconf-editor, but I’m SSHing in, so I need to use gconftool-2 as follows:
gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/remote_access/disable_xdamage" --type boolean "true"
Personally, I only want to ever connect over OpenVPN to this, so I added the following:
gconftool-2 --set "/desktop/gnome/remote_access/network_interface" --type string "tun0"
You may wish to only ever access it over SSH, in which case replace “tun0” with “lo”
Now, I next made a big mistake. I followed some duff guidance, and ended up killing my vino server (I’m still not sure if I was supposed to do this or not), but to get it back, I followed this instruction to restart it. I had to tweak it a little:
sudo x11vnc -rfbport 5901 -auth guess
Once you’ve started this, tunnel an extra port (5901) to your machine, start VNC to the tunnelled port, and then go back through the options above. Exit your VNC session to the new tunnelled port, and then hit Control+C on the SSH session to close that x11vnc service.
