Getting TightVNC to work with GDM/KDM

[MDesigner]

Wow, my first "How I Did It" post.. I feel proud :)

Here's how to get TightVNC working with GDM/KDM (meaning: you can use TightVNC to connect to your Linux box, and log in as anyone you want, rather than running vncserver as a certain user and being limited to that login only)

I owe thanks to this article:
http://inferno.slug.org/lfs-hints/tightvnc.txt

Just follow the steps there. However, you need xinetd installed and running, which is really simple:

1) Go to http://www.xinetd.org/ and grab the source, unpackage it, configure, make, make install.
2) Be sure xinetd will run on bootup (on Slackware, add /usr/local/sbin/xinetd to your /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2 file (or somewhere else more appropriate, someone please feel free to correct me here)
3) Follow the steps in the above link.

Works like a charm! I can connect to my Slackware box, get presented with the GDM (though, it's the simple greeter, not the graphical greeter...weird).

[MDesigner]

It appears there's a problem I can't figure out. If I VNC into the machine, and log in..things work fine. But if I open a terminal, and su root, then try to run an X app, sometimes it can't connect (not authorized), and other times it works but gives this warning message:

(gedit:1656): GnomeUI-WARNING **: While connecting to session manager:
Authentication Rejected, reason : None of the authentication protocols specified are supported and host-based authentication failed.

Any ideas?

[Icarus]

Try
xhost -localhost

before running the su for root

It is a different error then the normal can't connect xserver to host, but it may work...?

[MDesigner]

Nope.. that takes localhost off the auth list, then the app won't even run because the "client is not authorized by the server." So I do "xhost +localhost" and it works.. I still get the warning, but the app does run. Strange. Clearly the instructions I followed have led me to change things I don't understand, so something is behaving weirdly now as a result.

[Icarus]

Originally posted by MDesigner
Nope.. that takes localhost off the auth list, then the app won't even run because the "client is not authorized by the server." So I do "xhost +localhost" and it works.. Whoops, typo on my part, sorry

Thanks for the correction...

[AdamZ]

When you su to root, set the (IIRC) XAUTHORITY evironment variable to the location of you .xauthority file (usually ~/.xauthority or ~/.Xauthority). That should get rid of the warning.

[MDesigner]

Hmm, tried it out.. no, setting the XAUTHORITY var didn't help. When I get the connection refused error, it solves that (same result as "xhost +localhost"). But the warning is still there.

[MDesigner]

Just FYI.. "xhost +" is the best solution it seems.. it got rid of all warnings/error messages.