VNCserver XDM on Startup?

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Sunday 16 January 2005 11:41 pm, David Nicol wrote:

> umm, man inittab?

> I tend to put start-up things in inittab rather than in /etc/rc.d/
> start-up scripts, but that's just me.

When configuring a service to start at boot by default, I usually use 
chkconfig to add it to the default runlevel.  This is assuming that there's a 
startup script in /etc/init.d (use rc-update on gentoo).

I think the real question here from Jon Moss though is about how to have 
VNCserver act as a GUI Login manager like XDM, as opposed to serving a mirror 
of an existing GUI session on the host.

> > I have Fedora Core 3 and would like to have VNCserver autoload on startup
> > and give me a login screen when I attach remotely via SSH tunnel.
> > Is this possible?  Can someone point me to a howto or other similar
> > documentation?

I wasn't able to get this to work, although the vnc documentation certainly 
implies that something like this is possible.  I was not able to do anything 
useful with VNCserver remotely - from the SSH connection.  It would only work 
when launched from a running GUI session, and it was slow enough over a 54Mb 
home wireless connection that I didn't really pursue it.

What I was able to do was to get XDM to accept remote log-ins and sessions, 
and the speed was a LOT better than VNC.  The problem I ran into with this 
was that the keyboard on my laptop was not defined correctly, and I was 
unable to use any punctuation symbols - particularly the forawrd slash ("/") 
(nor could I type that sequence).

I found a lot of useful information on this by researching Xterminals and the 
Linux Terminal Server Project.  We have some LUG members who work with Lumen 
Software and do a LOT of work with LTSP, and they were helpful.

What might be easiest with an SSH connection though would be to just launch X 
or to launch your favorite Window Manager, either manually or via a line in 
your bashrc.

Something to watch out for though:  If you tend to leave yourself logged in on 
the host, a second GUI session from a remote connection will have problems 
with locked files and competition for certain resources like addressbooks and 
mail files.