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TightVNC Server Setup

Introduction

VNC or ‘Virtual Network Computing’ is a connection system that allows you to use your keyboard and mouse to interact with a graphical desktop environment on a remote server. It makes controlling your server easier for users who are not comfortable with the command line.

Prerequisites

  • Running Ubuntu Orbit

Installing TightVNC and Desktop Utilities

  1. We first need to install some Gnome desktop utilities which will help setup our display that we will be viewing and we will be installing tightvncserver as well

    sudo apt-get install gnome-panel gnome-settings-daemon metacity nautilus gnome-terminal tightvncserver
  2. Once everything is installed you can move on to the next step

Configuring TightVNC

  1. We need to set a password for our server. Run the following command and it will ask you for a password and to verify it.

    vncserver

    VNC Password

  2. Before we can actually connect to our system remotely we need to let our server start all our desktop utilities whenever it runs. To do so we need to add the following to the startup file. First we kill the server by running the following:

    vncserver -kill :1

    Now we can properly edit the startup file by running:

    vim ~/.vnc/xstartup

    Add the following into the file like the image below and save it

    VNC Startup File

  3. Once the startup file is saved we can restart the server by running:

    vncserver
  4. You should see an output similar to the following

    Output
    New 'X' desktop is your_server_name.com:1
    Starting applications specified in /home/user/.vnc/xstartup
    Log file is /home/user/.vnc/liniverse.com:1.log

Connecting with VNC

  1. Connecting to your VNC server is simple. Just use any VNC viewer application from another system and for the address, you will put your orbit’s ip address followed by port 5901. Like the following:

    38.76.118.251:5901

    You will be asked for the password that you set up when you configured the server and you should be good to go.