The strange tale of VNC on Linux
I have an old Fujitsu laptop running Windows 98. It has a whopping 48 megs of RAM and a massive 1.2 gb hard disk. Back in what, 1996 or 1997, that was state of the art. Now, however, well, you get the idea. So, I figure, I've got a nice ol Linux server downstairs; if I run VNC on the server, I can run the VNC client on my Windows 98 laptop, and I'll be good to go.
And so begins the strange tale of VNC on Linux.
From my crusty laptop, I ran puTTY and logged into the linux box.
I downloaded the latest VNC and tried to install it. I got slammed with a bunch of missing dependencies. Lame. I googled for solutions, and it seemd that yum is a good tool to use when you have dependency issues. Yum it is.
From there, it was a case of getting yum to install the VNC server for me
# yum install vnc-server
And after a few moments, there it was. But how to run it?
# vncserver
That was hard. Okay, so from my laptop, I fire up the VNC client and try to attach to the server. Pretend my server is named "pig". So, when the VNC client asks for a server, I put in "pig". What do I get? Denied. Great. Well, it turns out that when connecting to Linux, you gotta state which instance you want to connect to.
Instead of "pig", I put in "pig:1".
Success!
No, not really.
Do I get a graphical display just like doing a Windows remote control session? NoOoOoOo. Instead I get a lame command-line shell! Oh, well, it has colors, but, it's a command line! Why bother with that? I could simply do puTTY and get a command line.
I figure I can launch Firefox. Somehow. Well, here is how to fire up Firefox from a Linux VNC session:
Locate firefox-installer on your Linux box. From within the firefox-installer directory, you run firefox. In my case, it looks like this:
# cd /home/myaccount/mozilla/firefox-installer
# ./firefox
and I see this skeleton frame form, and after about 45 seconds, there is Firefox! Yeah!
I google up some pages, and it works nice. I go over to my own website, this very one, and try to log in. And the screen just sits there. Nothing. I'm thinking it is a popup blocker setting or something else, so I go to check the preferences, and, well, it becomes real obvious what the problem is.
Firefox just doesn't do multiple windows well in X. That's all there is to it. The behavior was just weird. So, although it does work, it does not work well.
And that is the strange tale of VNC on Linux.
