Install and auto-start VNC server on AA1?

Hi all,

Bought my grandmother an AA1 and set her up at home. Most of the time it is fine but on occasion she has problems and as she is a 4 hour drive away I have to try and talk her through it on the phone. Let's just say this can be quite time consuming - like 45 mins to help her send an email

So, I figure if I can install VNC server on the AA1 I can then remotely access it, take control and even *show* her what to do

I *know* this can be done but I rather hoped someone might provide the forum with a step-by-step guide. I am new to this flavour of linux but am open to ideas if VNC is not the best solution. I will be connecting from a Windows machine through open ports on her router.

Hope you can help...

TIA - Rich

 

I don't have my linpus model anymore, (I got the hard drive version, wiped XP and installed Fedora) but it should, in theory, be pretty simple.

sudo yum -y install vnc-server

Once it's installed, type in a terminal
vncserver
(No sudo, she's doing this as the user "user".)
It will ask for a password.
She should create a password, no longer than 8 characters, vncserver doesn't support more than 8 characters---for example, if you have a 15 character password, you only have to type the first 8 letters of it--that's all it takes. (Sometimes, making a longer password will cause it to crash, so it's better to not even try.)

If you're not familiar with vncserver, the default session is a very simple twm session. I don't even know if Linpus has twm, so you should probably do the following.

pkill vncserver
Now, you will see in user's home directory, a hidden directory, called .vnc. (Note the period before "vnc", it's important.)

You will see a comment (prefaced with a #)

# Uncomment the following two lines for normal desktop:
# unset SESSION_MANAGER
# exec /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

Remove the # before the unset SESSION_MANAGER and the one before #exec /etc/X11/init/xinitrc

After that, you should be able to vnc in. If she has a router, she should forward port 5900 and 5901 (I think) to the AA1's IP address.

When you use vncviewer to get in, you have to put the display number, which will be display 1 by default, in other words
vncviewer <ipaddress>:1
(Note the colon before the 1)

There's also the nomachines nxserver and client which are, in my experience, usually faster. If you go to nomachine.com you can downoad the free version of the server and client. I have a little page on that at http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/rhnx.html

Note that if you read that and decide to try the opensource freenx version, it is possibly broken, (at least for me) in Fedora 9. However, the commercial version is easier to set up. I would, however, only have your grandma run it when she needs to give you access. In that case, she would forward port 22 to the AA1's address.

HTH

 

Thanks for the prompt response

One question, if I install it in this way (user environment) will it autostart on boot? She is VERY computer illiterate and there is no way she'll figure out how to start the prog by herself. I am hapy to accept the obvious security implications of this.

Rich

 

In Fedora one uses chkconfig to do that. I'm not sure if that's available in linpus. However, you can at least try
sudo chkconfig vncserver on

Or just write down these steps for her.
Hit alt+F2
When the little box opens, type in xterm
A terminal will open up. (Show her this of course, otherwise, you start having to write things like a white box will open up.)
In the box type
vncserver &

When she gets back to the $ command prompt type

exit
Terminal closes and all is good.
Something else, that might be necessary--again, I'm really not sure on Linpus as I no longer have it to test.
In CentOS, Fedora and friends, there's an /etc/sysconfig/vncservers file.
It has a lot of commented lines. You'll see towards the end something like

# VNCSERVERS="2:myusername"
If that file exists in Linpus, and doing chkconfig doesn't work as expected, you might want to change that line to read

VNCSERVERS="1:user"

 

Hi - installed it with no probs but can only get it to conect on anything other than :0 - which is the one I need to help my grandmother when she is stuck

R