Ubuntu Networking :: Headless GNOME VNC Server On Lucid Lynx Desktop ?

I had to do quite a lot of digging before I managed to work out how to do this. It turns out to be reasonably straight forward, and so here is my howto all in one place.

Objective: Connect to my Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx) Desktop machine (which does not have a screen or keyboard) using a remote desktop viewer and get my usual GNOME desktop interface. And have the desktop persist while I am not disconnected.

I have recently discovered one niggly issue with some of the keys being messed up. 'm' and 's' in particular? I am looking into it and will update this post when I have resolved it.

The following steps were performed on a freshly installed version of Ubuntu 10.04-desktop. Just for clarity:

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Install a VNC server. There is a choice of servers I chose the "tight" one.

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Setup your VNC password. This password isn't very important as my setup will only allow for connections via SSH, so 123456 is what I used. One can possibly disable it?

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At this point or the first time you run 'vncserver' (I forgot to check) the all important and much discussed ~/.vnc/xstartup file is auto generated. This is the make or break place where you can either get GNOME over VNC or not. My xstartup which required NO changes was:

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Give the VNC server a test, by running it from the command line.

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Try connecting to the VNC server:

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Ok if that all worked then great! It all did for me and my machine was fresh from the CD.

Now we setup the VNC server to run all the time. There are a variety of ways of doing this. Since this howto requires the use of a SSH shell one could quite easily run the vncserver (as we did above to test it) and then disown (haven't tested if this is actually required) commands the first time you connect. This would leave the VNC server running until you used the vncserver --kill command. This would be a suitable approach if you had many different users wanting to have VNC GNOME desktops.

For convenience in a single user setup we can get the VNC server to be started at boot time:

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Make the contents of 'vncserver.user' (credits to some smart guy on some blog out there that I couldn't find again. and then I made a few improvements):

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