February 26th, 2008VNC to GDM, with login … it can work !
The reason for the recrudescence of Ubuntu posts on this blog was originally due to me wanting to put that free OS on a couple of old machines I had at home. For some of them it worked, for some it did not, but at one point I still had to buy a brand new machine, and this was the real key starting point in my Ubuntu experience. Only problem is that I did not expect my wife to like this move and as result have her take possession of the new hardware on the sole excuse that it works much better for her drawings/website designing hobby. That leaves me with my old machine, still running Windows XP (since some games for my little kid only work there) and me getting frustrated ! So I decided I’d made a better use of my super new hardware and have the both of us actually use the good machine, and use the old one just for it’s screen and keyboard !
I started to look for some info on the Internet, and found this first Howto about the subject. The idea is to install and configure a different Xserver than the one used by default in Ubuntu, configure GDM (the default window manager) to enable remote access as well as remote login, and finally use a simple VNC viewer on the client side to access the beauty. Unfortunately it’s only after a few tests that I discovered that it was addressing a rather old version of Ubuntu, and that Gutsy definitely needed some different configuration … But after already a few hours of work, I was on the good track.
I continued looking for info, and found the official help page for VNC, which I though would directly give me the good configuration to apply … This was to good to be true 
First let me say about this tutorial is that I do not really understand their server/client differentiation since all the GDM configuration actually happens on the server side … or at least that’s were I did it ! But since the first tutorial was pretty clear, I took it that on was on the right page. Anyhow this help page gave me some few extra pointers but I still could not get the connection from the client working and still got the “connection refused” message. At that point, I was really getting annoyed and close to letting everything go.
Fortunately I finally found this post which doesn’t say much, but made my day ! It helped me tuneup the last configuration problem I had ! And I was up and running with my new hardware from my old system !
With all that, you don’t know what configuration I made … Don’t worry here it comes !
- First I installed xinetd via the traditional
sudo apt-get install xinetd
- Then I configured the vnc service by creating a vnc file in the /etc/xinetd.d/ directory :
sudo nano /etc/xinetd.d/vnc
and adding the folowing data into it
service vnc { disable = no socket_type = stream protocol = tcp wait = no user = nobody server = /usr/bin/Xvnc server_args = -inetd :1 -query ::1 -broadcast -once -fp /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/ -securitytypes=none -desktop=Server -extension XFIXES -geometry 1152x864 }Note that the final parameter (geometry) is actually the size of the old machine, so the one I’ll be connecting from with the VNC client.
- I modified the /etc/services file to add this line:
vnc 5901/tcp # VNC with GDM
- I modified the gdm.conf (/etc/gdm/gdm.conf) file to have the following lines in the sections :
.... Greeter=/usr/lib/gdm/gdmgreeter .... DisallowTCP=false .... [xdmcp] Enable=true ….
- Finally restarting the xinetd and gdm services (sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart) should do the trick, but I did so many reboots, that a last one did not hurt so that’s what I did !
- And after all that, I used TightVnc client to connect to my mew machine on port 5901 ( you can actually also use xxx:1 instead of xxx:5901) and I saw the beautiful GDM login screen !
It is a warrior’s road, but there is an end to it … Keep faith, and result will come boys ! That’s always what I’m telling myself when dealing with Ubuntu’s tricky configuration problems 
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