Enable VNC for Zentyal Community Server

Posted: February 27th, 2013 | Author: jordan | Filed under: Blog, DNS, Kerberos, krb5, LDAP, Linux, Networking, Work, Zentyal | 4 Comments »

Get a terminal session on your Zentyal box and install the VNC service

sudo apt-get install vnc4server

Next, run the server once to initialize a config file, kill the service and make a backup of the config file and then edit.

vncserver vncserver -kill :1 cp .vnc/xstartup .vnc/xstartup.bak nano .vnc/xstartup

Uncomment one line and add another:

# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop: unset SESSION_MANAGER # exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc /usr/bin/lxsession -s LXDE -e LXDE

Then just launch
vncserver

Watch the output so you can ensure what port to connect to. For example, the following means my VNC server is listening on port 5901

jordan@mrsparkle:/etc/X11$ vncserver


New 'mrsparkle:1 (jordan)' desktop is mrsparkle:1

Starting applications specified in /home/jordan/.vnc/xstartup Log file is /home/jordan/.vnc/mrsparkle:1.log

1 tace said at 2:25 am on May 11th, 2014:
Does not work.. Can’t connect to my server – when I try it with the hostname it is endless trying to connect, and when I try it with the IP address it says connection timed out..

Tried without a port, with 5901 and 1.

Please help
2 jordan said at 7:21 am on May 13th, 2014:
Hi tace,

After following the guide you could simple use ps aux | grep vncserver to find the port number. Probably going to start with 590x
3 Wes said at 11:50 am on October 14th, 2014:
I did this and everything worked just fine up until I connect to the machine. Once connected, all I get is a grey colored screen. What did I miss or am missing?

Thanks for the write man!
4 Mr_B said at 5:23 pm on October 15th, 2014:
It worked for me… after I added a couple of steps. The Zentyal firewall is blocking the VNC. In the Zentyal web admin, you need to click on Network->Services->Add New and add a service for port 5901. Then you need to go to Firewall->Packet Filter and configure rules for “Filtering rules from internal networks to Zentyal”. Click Add New and select the new service that you created and it will open up port 5901. Thanks!

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