On 05/16 10:20 , Ryan Coleman wrote:
> I’m seriously struggling getting VNC to work on Ubuntu 16.04LTS… What do I need to do to get it showing the native desktop as opposed to showing me a default X shell? 

The last time I did this, it was on a SuSE box, but the proceedure I doco'ed
at the time is:

Install the x11vnc package.

The basic usage of x11vnc is to run this command on the machine you want
to serve up the display from:

x11vnc -display :0

This will 'screen scrape' the desktop and allow anyone to connect to the
virtual display provided by VNC and thereby control the desktop.
However, there's no password on this.

To set up a password, run this command (as the user who owns the
desktop, of course):

x11vnc -storepasswd 

This will create a ~/.vnc/passwd file which contains a hash of the
password you entered.

To use that password to require authentication to the VNC session, use
this command when starting x11vnc:

x11vnc -usepw -display :0

It should be noted that while this at least requires a password for
authentication, it does *not* encrypt the connection. To get that we
would use the -ssl option, like so:

x11vnc -usepw -ssl -display :0

Or else wrap the connection in an SSH tunnel.
The advantage of an SSH tunnel is that it can apply some compression to
the stream, which may be desireable over slow links.

An SSH tunnel would be set up with a command similar to this:

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 user at host.example.tld "x11vnc -usepw
-ssl -display :0"

This would log into the 'user' account on host.example.tld, set up
a tunnel from port 5900 on host.example.tld to port 5900 on the host
originating this command (i.e. your desktop). In order to use this, you
would point your VNC client to localhost:5900 or localhost:0

It is possible to script the above, and probably launch a VNC viewer at
the same time to connect to that host. This will require a little more
time to hash out the details of, but an example script is to be found here:

http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/#tunneling

HTH
-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com