VNC Login on Ubuntu 9.10

I am setting up a new home server to replace the existing one, in the hope of reducing power consumption. The new server is a laptop with a broken screen.

I just configured a VNC Login screen, so here are the notes that I made. (The previous post used an earlier version of Ubuntu.)

The first requirement for the VNC login screen is a XDMCP server, such as GDM. The new GDM configuration applet does not provide much, but after a quick search I found a guide on Enabling XDMCP on Karmic Koala.

I created the file /etc/gdm/custom.conf containing

[xdmcp]
Enable=true

and restarted gdm

sudo restart gdm

which enabled XDMCP.

I also installed a VNC server

sudo apt-get install vnc4server

which will provide the X server for VNC logins.

Finally, an inetd needed to be installed

sudo apt-get install xinetd

so that the vnc service can be configured.

To configure the VNC service I created the configuration file /etc/xinetd.d/vnc

service vnc
{
    type = UNLISTED
    port = 5900
    only_from = localhost 192.168.0.0/24
    disable = no
    socket_type = stream
    protocol = tcp
    wait = no
    user = nobody
    server = /usr/local/bin/xvnc-inetd
}

and the script /usr/local/bin/xvnc-inetd

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/Xvnc \
 -inetd \
 -query localhost \
 -once \
 -SecurityTypes=None \
 -pn \
 -extension XFIXES

which was named in the configuration. The script is just to keep the line lengths down, making things look cleaner.

Finally I restarted xinetd.

sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

And it works.

The problems I have with the setup at the moment is that the login screen lists the users instead of asking for the name to be typed, and allows shutdown of the system from the login screen.