A.P. Lawrence

Detailed procedure for installation of VNC on OpenServer

Lytle David Smith
1421 Lexington Road
Louisville, Kentucky  40206
Voice: (502) 561-1111
Fax: (502) 231-9215
E-mail: Home@ComputerLandInc.com
http://david.computerlandinc.com/

I've been working hard to get VNC working on OpenServer 5.0.6. In doing so, I have written these Bourne shell scripts to automate the process of downloading, extracting, installing and configuring the binaries for tightvnc and all of the packages on which it depends.

Apparently there are some issues with having the VNC Java client work in conjunction with inetd. The "5_configure" script will prompt you to choose between the Java client and inetd. It appears to be because when an attempt is made to connect to port 58XX, thus initiating a download of the Java client, VNC is not actually running at that point. It doesn't get launched until after the Java client is already downloaded and executing.

I tried embedding the Java client into a web page, but I couldn't get it to work. The Java client would download and prompt for a password, but then it would report an error, "java.io.EOFException".

If you choose the Java client, you will be prompted to select a VNC password that must be used by the operator to connect to VNC, but the operator will not be required to login once connected, and they will be logged-in as root. If anyone can tell me how to configure TightVNC to prompt for a login when launched at boot-time, then perhaps I can modify the script to do that. I tried changing "scosession" to "scologin" in /.vnc/xstartup, but it wouldn't work that way.

If you choose inetd, VNC will allow connections without a password, but the operator will be presented with a login prompt with which they can login as any user. If anyone can tell me where TightVNC stores the password when launched by inetd, then perhaps I can modify the script to utilize it. It isn't under /.vnc. I think that's because inetd is starting Xvnc with NOLUID, so it doesn't look in /.vnc, which is root's home directory.

Below are the scripts that I used to download, extract, install and configure tightvnc on OpenServer Enterprise 5.0.6. I have divided the process into five separate scripts, because I wanted to be able to repeat certain sections without repeating the entire process.

Comments /OSR5/osr5vnc.html


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