On 02/23/2014 11:28 AM, Ken Causey wrote:

On 02/23/2014 10:12 AM, Chris Cunnington wrote:

I could not figure how Chris Muller was constantly logged in all the
time. Every time I logged in I typed who to see if anybody's around.
The :1 told me that VNC was likely involved, but I didn't realized it
was its own process. I was talking to Ken about using Ian's RFB.
I recall a conversation about six-eight months about where Levente
recommended TightVNC (IIRC). I figure I'll switch to that and we can
make it the
standard for box4. I assume that this single process can have another
port such as 5902/:2 added to it?

Chris

Yes, with external VNC there is an external process that acts as an X
client that interfaces to the VNC protocol.

Chris is logged in because, well it is in some sense a full X desktop so
you can have multiple programs running, and he has a terminal open on
the VNC he started for his source.squeak.org mirror and he is logged in
in it.

Using external VNC is only slightly more complicated that RFB.

s/that/than/

1. Login and stay in your home directory then

mkdir .vnc

2. Using your favorite text editor add a xstartup file to that
directory, this is a script that is started after the X client is open
to start X server programs.  Feel free to copy mine at

/home/ken/.vnc/xstartup

This should of course be

/home/kencausey/.vnc/xstartup

as a starting point.

3. Run

vncpasswd

to set your password

4. Run

vncserver

This will report back to you your port number which you would then
specify on your local VNC client.  If :1 is in use but not :2 then you
will get :2, and so on.

Not that in ~/.vnc there are a couple of files created that can be of
some value.  There is a .pid file that stores the process ID of the
xtightvncserver process.  More usefully there is a .log file that logs
any stdout/stderr from the processes.  For example if squeak fails to
start or crashes you can find useful info there.

Finally, when you are done, run

vncserver -kill :<port number>

To stop the VNC server and all the programs that were started under it.
 <port number> is of course the number reported when you ran vncserver
before and what you used to connect beyond of course the hostname.

Hopefully this makes it reasonably clear.

Ken

P.S. And just to be sure your realize it, once you have done this once, unless of course you want to modify your xstartup or set a new password, you can just start at step 4 in the future.