Setting up a resumable remote login to ubuntu with vnc

I’ve changed my home server from Centos 5.1 (32bit) to Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 (64bit) due to the CentOS drive crashing – it was real old. As my server doesn’t actually have a screen when it’s carefully hidden away I initially enabled Remote Desktop for GUI access. This worked ok, although slightly sluggish, in conjunction with Chicken of the VNC running on my MacBook as the viewer.

Problems arose once I rebooted it without the monitor plugged in as it defaulted to 800×600 without any obvious way of controlling this. Things got real annoying though when I discovered that a number of dialogs are longer than 600 pixels and I couldn’t see half the windows. That’s a real basic thing which shouldn’t be wrong.

So I tried installing the VNC Server itself and running that with options specifying my desired resolution

sudo apt-get install vnc4server
vncserver :1 -geometry 1024x768 -depth 16

only to be presented with X11 rather than the Gnome Desktop Manager when I connected. Of note is that when you first run vncserver it’ll ask you for a password and setup a ~/.vnc folder to store that and an xstartup script.

After a bit of a google I found a helpful post showing how to configure and launch vncserver through xinetd as well as powering up GDM. Follow it exactly as it works a treat. It’s part of a thread titled HOWTO: Set up VNC Server with resumable sessions.

Logging in though reveled a new problem – the Gnome Theme Setting manager was constantly crashing and causing the current theme to continually be applied then dropped. I was given this error “there was an error starting the GNOME settings daemon“.

Turns out this is a recent problem with the 4.1.1 version of vnc4server and the fix has yet to be rolled into a package for Ubuntu. I found custom deb files with the latest version of vnc. Francesco Santini has helpfully copied across the compiled binaries from the latest vncserver 4.1.2 Fedora 9 packages, which have the fix, into has own i386 deb files for people to download and install – no help for my 64bit install of Ubuntu though.

I actually tried looking for the vnc source code, thinking I could just compile that directly, but that route started proving harder than I thought it should. So, I’ve ended following Francesco’s lead and copying out the binaries from the Fedora VNC x86_64 packages manually like this:

wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/updates/9/x86_64.newkey/vnc-server-4.1.2-31.fc9.x86_64.rpm
wget ftp://rpmfind.net/linux/fedora/updates/9/x86_64.newkey/vnc-libs-4.1.2-31.fc9.x86_64.rpm
 
rpm2cpio vnc-server-4.1.2-31.fc9.x86_64.rpm | cpio -dimv
rpm2cpio vnc-libs-4.1.2-31.fc9.x86_64.rpm | cpio -dimv

And then copy them over top of my existing vnc binaries like so:

sudo cp usr/bin/* /usr/bin
sudo cp usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions/libvnc.so /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/extensions
sudo cp usr/lib64/librfb.so.* /usr/lib64

If you don’t have ‘rpm2cpio’ you’ll have to install rpm itself, a bit unnecessary and self defeating sounding I know:

sudo apt-get install

I found the latest vnc-server and the vnc-libs Fedora 9 x86_64 packages on rpmfind.net.

After doing all that I seemed to have made the situation worse and was getting a connection denied error from my viewer. A but more hunting and the problem turned out to be that the Fedora binaries, Xvnc in particullar, were expecting the libcrypto package and for one of it’s binaries to be differently named. I figure that’s due to them being compiled for Fedora. The following sorted that problem:

sudo apt-get install libcrypto++7 libcrypto++-utils
sudo ln -snf /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.7

From memory I don’t think vncserver had this problem, just Xvnc, making the issue a bit harder to diagnose as running vncserver manually allowed me to connect, but not with the GDM login.

Having done all that I can now login to GDM and don’t get the crazy theme errors anymore, plus it’s noticeably faster. Something I discovered is that Chicken of the VNC doesn’t disconnect when you close the viewer window – and thus you can’t reconnect until you have quit the application. A bit suck, but oh well.

During my travels I found that I could manually do what xinetd was doing with this command:

sudo vncserver :5 -geometry 1200x750 passwordFile=~/.vnc/passwd -query localhost -fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc

Additionally I discovered the ‘alien’ package which converts rpm files to deb, which might ultmately be an easier way to install the latest version of vncserver from Fedora while maintaining a single package system.

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