[Bassetlug mailing] vnc issues

[Rev Mark Pengelly]

I was earwigging on a conversation about remote VNC sessions at the end
of BassetLUG last time and have done a little digging on the subject as
I often struggle with it myself.

The main area of confusion for me is that vnc X sessions can send you
either the running, logged-on user session that is showing on the local
physical monitor; this is usually accessed by typing servername:0 
These sessions are only served once that local user has logged on (I
think?), ie linked to that local users logon. There is a user based
config file for this and it sends the desktop that the local user uses
(eg gnome, kde, xfce, windows etc).

In linux (and other multi-user systems?) VNC can also serve any other
number(?) of new logon sessions, accessed by severname:1 servername:2
etc.
I need to get my head round these, as logging on to a remote machine,
before the local user has, is not possible otherwise (right?). But by
default these sessions bring up the gray checkerbox desktop, this is the
the twm desktop. It (bizarrely?) has no menus etc, so seems useless to
me? I think, for those who know what they're doing with it you can
configure it to have icons etc... my understanding is that this desktop
can be changed for a gnome session (or whatever), but haven't really
figured which conf file does that.

This forum thread seems to be all about it if you've interested...
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-desktop-x-windows/550-grey-desktop-vnc.html


Mark P,