I am working in a Fedora 11 virtual on a PC running Windows 7. I can use a VNC client on another machine, or even under Windows on my own machine, to log into the Linux virtual if I go to the Gnome desktop and configure "System->Preferences->Remote Desktop" to allow it. I do not need to explicitly start a VNC server. However, when I do log in with VNC from another machine, I do not get a separate desktop, but only a view to the desktop that someone sitting at the PC sees. Whatever I do through VNC from the remote machine is visible to someone sitting at the PC. I wish to be able to log in remotely and get a separate desktop and start apps that only I see. Can Gnome be adjusted to behave this way, and, if not, what can I install in my Linux virtual to do VNC better or to be able to do a remote login that gets its own desktop?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

Brandon

This might help:

In your ubuntu system, start another vnc server

vncserver -geometry 1024x768

(note the display number that you are getting).


From your remote system, start the vnc client and connect to the ubuntu server like so

ip_of_ubuntu_system:<display_number_of_server>

ip_of_ubuntu_system:0 (0 as in zero) is probably the desktop of your virtual PC.

On some clients, selecting a server must be done by specifying the server's port address.
For server :1, this would be 5901, for :2 it would be 5902, etc.

I appreciate your input, but typing "which vncserver" in the virtual I happened to have open, Fedora 11, failed to locate that command/executable. The same result for Ubuntu 10.04.

Starting a VNC server is what you are doing when you go to System->Preferences->Remote Desktop. Specifically that starts up VNC server called vino (That appears to be the official vino webpage. Seems rather lack lustre somehow.)


You could try using vino with GDM
http://linux.koolsolutions.com/2009/...een-using-vnc/
http://jakeyoon.com/2008/11/19/enabl...gdm-in-ubuntu/
(Put 'gdm vino' in to Google for more like this)
Or you could look at FreeNX.

FreeNX does everything over SSH. As far as I know Vino lacks any encryption except for the initial password exchange.

I forget to say that the vncserver binary is part of the tightvnc package which is probably in the Fedora repos. (Or at least it is on openSUSE, I don't have Fedora or Ubuntu to hand.)

It appears that your system comes with a vnc server baked in. However that vnc server is written such that it shares the desktop (display :0).

If you want to have a separate display, you probably need to install a vnc server package (using 'yum' on Fedora, I guess), (on ubuntu there are two choices: tightvncserver or vnc4server. For Fedora I don't know).

I'm using vnc4server on ubuntu and can get multiple new displays by invoking vncserver from the command line.