The main reason I continue to use vnc after all these years is that it allows me to quickly start a remote session by connecting to the remote host over ssh and then launching vncserver in that remote console.

Now run vncserver again, and view the remote desktop with vncviewer (entering the remote password chosen previously).

Xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title '$VNCDESKTOP Desktop' & # xstartup to launch fvwm desktop session vnc (in the home directory of the user who will be launching remote sessions) to use fvwm as the remote desktop: $ sudo update-icon-caches /usr/local/share/icons/* Kill the remote session once done testing: $ vncserver -kill :2 Log file is /home/plembo/.vnc/test002:2.log

Starting applications specified in /home/plembo/.vnc/xstartup New 'test002:2 (plembo)' desktop is test002:2

Run vncserver and vncviewer as an ordinary user just to ensure they are working:.

$ sudo chmod ugo+x /usr/local/bin/vncserver This file should be downloaded and copied to /usr/local/bin.

The vncserver perl script is missing from the official binary release of TigerVNC for Linux beginning with v1.11.0, but is available from a fork of the official repo.

Since my personal use of remote desktop sessions is to manage servers, the lack of a full desktop experience is not a drawback for me. This has the advantage of using a lot less bandwidth and makes things more responsive over the network. For remote sessions using vnc I specify fvwm in my xstartup file (fvwm is slightly better than the even older twm). If you really want to use Gnome remotely, you should look for a different solution like the proprietary NoMachine or Gnome's built-in desktop sharing option.

While I continue to use the default Gnome Shell desktop on 18.04 LTS locally, it no longer works in a remote desktop session. How to download and install this file are provided below. Fortunately, this file is available from a fork of the official repo. NOTE: A key file is missing from the latest official binary release of TigerVNC for Linux, a perl script named vncserver. My workaround is to use the latest stable version from the TigerVNC project Github release page, where generic binaries for 32 and 64-bit Linux are distributed as tarballs (dmg and exe installers for Mac and Windows are also available). There are packages for TigerVNC in the repositories of the major distributions, but the latest versions for Ubuntu are broken. While I recently tested under Ubuntu 19.10, I have no plans to test non-LTS versions in the future. TigerVNC is a remote desktop session server and viewer solution sponsored by Red Hat that is still in active development. I won't be updating this gist any more, but will leave it up as a reference for others. NOTE: Given its current state, I've given up on tigervnc and now rely on 'ssh -X' to execute remote gui apps.

Vnc server on ubuntu