Why VNC not showing actual Remote Desktop

rhelvnc

Ok i installed vnc server on RHEL 5.9 and also installed Tightvnc viewer on windows 7 and from RHEL i started vncserver and assigned the password using vncpasswd.

Then from tightvnc viewer i gave the IP and listening port xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:1. It successfully connected with VNC server installed and running on RHEL. And then I gave the password and then BOOOM it gave me this hideous interface

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When Actual Desktop is like this

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Ok people tell me what Im missing

Best Answer

What you see probably is the X11 session defined in ~/.vnc/xstartup, a minimal X11 session, maybe something like (this is how it looks like on Debian)

#!/bin/sh
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
x-terminal-emulator -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" &
x-window-manager &

on another display, probably :1.

There're two things you can do:

  • To access a different desktop that looks the same, you have to start it in this xstartup file, e.g. with exec gnome-session or something similar, have a look for documentation on xinitrc or xsession[rc])
  • To access the same desktop session, you need a different VNC server. x11vnc can do desktop sharing; in your GNOME environment, Vino is probably the preferable choice (as Ignacio pointed out)
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