2

Before we begin, please excuse my complete ignorance, I am a relative novice to system administration.

I know there are a few posts so far about Ubuntu 14.04 messing with VNC connections. So far my case does not seem to match theirs and I have tried many fixes.

I was running Ubuntu 12 LTS with Webmin, SSH, Samba, and VNC viewer for remote connections. I upgraded to 14.04 and now VNCviewer connections can be made but yield a grey screen with what appear to be little fabric looking threads criss-crossing the screen.

I have tried all the dconf edits such as unchecking "enabled" and "encryption"

I have also changed the xstartup from the defaults to some alternative versions that load up the gnome desktop.

My question: Is this something that will just have to be resolved by the Ubuntu crew eventually and there is nothing I can do?

I am happy to post any information needed to answer your questions and retry solutions that you think will work.

I wanted to post a picture but I don't have enough reputation. Here's a link to the screenshot of a the VNC connection.VNC screenshot

Machindo
  • 61
  • 1
  • 1
  • 7

2 Answers2

4

Upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 reset the permissions for .vnc/xstartup. The log file that are found in the .vnc folder for each session was crucial to understanding what was going on. To fix this I used

sudo chmod 755 xstartup

This solved that problem but I was then left with a grey screen. After parsing through tons of solutions, none of which helped me I found this:

how-to-install-and-configure-vnc-on-ubuntu-14-04

I used the contents of the xstartup file listed there to get a passable vnc desktop

#!/bin/bash
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
startxfce4 &

All in all I'm really disappointed with this desktop setup but I'm hoping that some day the Unity environment will be available for VNC connections.

Machindo
  • 61
  • 1
  • 1
  • 7
0

I have had the same problem.

I went through every walkthrough I could find and changed all those settings that worked for everybody else. (dconf, permissions on ~/.vnx/xstartup, all that)

It turned out that I had installed too many desktop environments, and VNC didn't like it.

I was testing i3, kubuntu, gnome, xfce, and a couple others. I found that once I'd installed all these desktops, I couldn't uninstall them, even with apt-get --purge remove desktop and apt-get autoremove.

I reinstalled Ubuntu and installed just kde, VNC has worked fine since then.

Zach Olson
  • 11
  • 1
  • 7