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.
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
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