Hello World,

In our previous post, we have demonstrated how to configure the x11vnc server component to boot at startup.  We usually prefer to use the xRDP solution to perform remote desktop connection to linux machines from Windows Desktop.  However, with the release of xrdp 0.9.x package in the Ubuntu Repository for 16.04 and later, there seems to be some difficulties to make it works properly.  

If you are looking for a working solution to connect to Unity Desktop through xrdp in Ubuntu 16.04.2, please review this post (XRDP – Custom Install on Ubuntu 16.04.2 to Access Unity Desktop).  So far, this is the most workable solution and provides the necessary features needed for remote desktop connection solution

If you are looking for a working solution to connect to Unity Desktop through xrdp in Ubuntu 17.0, please review this post (XRDP – How to install XRDP on Ubuntu 17.04 – Easy Way). This solution works but there some limitations.  If you follow thes instructions, it’s possible to perform a remote desktop connection to Ubuntu and automatically load Unity Desktop.  However, there is a small limitation.  A user cannot be connected to local session and remote session simultaneously.  If the user is connected to the local session and then the user tries to perform a remote session, the xrdp solution will keep disconnecting…If the user logoff from the console, then the remote desktop session will be established accordingly.  

Because of this limitation, the possibility to make a vncserver starts at boot provide a fallback solution in order to connect remotely to the Ubuntu machine.  Till now, we have always been working with X11VNC to achieve this requirement (boot vncserver at startup).  Recently, one of my colleague challenged me to perform the same configuration with TigerVNC server. 

So, we decided to give it try…..(and it was not that easy I can tell you…) 

So let see how far we went with this challenge…. 

TigerVNC & Ubuntu 17.04

Download & Install the TigerVNC package 

TigerVNC Server package is not available in the Ubuntu repository. Recently, the TigerVNC team has released .deb package of TigerVNC server for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.  The latest version is the 1.8.0 which is available as a download from this location. 

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When the download is completed, open a Terminal console, navigate to the Download folders and perform the installation by issuing the following commands 

sudo dpkg -i tigervncserver_1.8.0-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb

If requested, provide the password and wait for completion of the installation process.  At the end of the process, you should notice some errors and warning messages.  

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This is normal and we need to fix that by issuing the following command 

sudo apt-get install -f -y

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At this stage, the tigervnc server is installed but you need to start it manually in order to perform your connection through a vnc viewer.  To start the vnc server, you would issue the following command 

vncserver

Because it’s the first time, you start the vncserver software, you will be prompted for a password (to be used when performing the connection), a read-only password if you want to and at the end, you should see information about which display to connect to 

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Try to connect through TigerVNC

At this stage, we have installed all the necessary software needed to perform a remote connection through a vnc viewer.  So, if you open your favorite vnc viewer (in our case tigervnc viewer), and we provide the information of the remote machine using the correct port (in our case :1)

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We should be prompted for a password. if this is the case, this means that the vnc service is running and we can perform the connection.  

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After providing the password, a remote session is established.  Howerver, in Ubuntu 17.04, as you can see on the screenshot below, only a black screen is presented to us….

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So, we first need to fix this issue before making the TigerVNC server boot at startup. 

Fixing the Black Screen display 

So, it take us some time to find out the most acceptable solution. To fix this issue, we have been updating the ~/.vnc/xstartup.sh file

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Actually, we have replaced the content of this file with the following content 

/usr/lib/gnome-session/gnome-session-binary –session=ubuntu &
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/unity/unity-panel-service &
/usr/lib/unity-settings-daemon/unity-settings-daemon &

for indicator in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/indicator-*;
do
basename=’basename \${indicator}’
dirname=’dirname \${indicator}’
service=\${dirname}/\${basename}/\${basename}-service
\${service} &
done
unity

If you look at the code above, you would see that’s exactly the same used to perform the xrdp connection against Unity Desktop but this time we used for VNC Connection.  

To apply these changes, you have to kill the existing vncserver session (using vncserver -kill :1) and restart again the vnc server by issuing the command vncserver in the Terminal console.  After issuing this command, you will notice that you are automatically logged out from the console session.   So, now if you try to perform the vnc connection, you should see the familiar Unity Desktop within your favorite vnc viewer 

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Here again, we have the problem that only one connection from the same user is allowed.  It’s either locally on the Ubuntu machine or through the remote connection.  If you are connected to the VNC Session and you login into the console, the vnc session will look like this one. So, the only way to restore the vnc capabilities is to kill and restart again the vnc service…. 

Make TigerVNC boot at startup  

This procedure will apply to one specify user.  If you have multiple users, you might need to create multiple Service Unity Files. As a reminder, this post is more about testing if it’s possible to have the TigerVNC server boot at startup and if we can use TigerVNC in conjuction with the Unity Desktop.   So, let’s proceed with our testing…… 

To have a service boot at startup, we usually need to create a Service Unit file that Systemd process can read and execute accordingly.  The necessary information needed to create the service unit was found at this location (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/TigerVNC).  We have simply re-used this information to create our own Service Unit file.  

Under the /etc/systemd/system directory, we have created the Service Unit file called tigervnc@:10.service

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The content of the file is the following.  You will need to update the content of the file to reflect your current configuration.  The User= value needs to be changed to the user name that will be able to connect to the vnc server at boot.  Note also that we want to perform our connection to display :10 

[Unit]
Description=Remote desktop service (VNC)
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=griffon
PAMName=griffon
PIDFile=/home/griffon/.vnc/%H%i.pid
ExecStart=/usr/bin/vncserver :10
ExecStop=/usr/bin/vncserver -kill %i

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

It’s time to configure the systemd accordingly as well.  So, to have the tigervnc service started and managed by systemd process, the following commands will be issues 

sudo systemctl enable tigervnc@\:10.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload 

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Reboot your machine, do not login locally on it and try to connect via the vnc protocol.  If everything is working as expected, you will be able to access your unity desktop immediately (no login greeter will be presented to you).

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Final Notes 

 Voila ! In this post, we have seen that it’s possible to first fix the TigerVNC Server software and make it work with Unity and secondly that the TigerVNC server can be configured to start at boot time.  This post was more about testing and experimenting and we think that x11vnc is still providing a better option because it works out of the box with Unity and it’s easier to have configured as a start up service when a computer starts.  

I hope you enjoyed our little journey into Tigervnc, systemd and Unity connection 

Till next time 

See ya