I’ve been doing a good amount of Ruby development lately and I really wanted to have a dedicated box to use as an internal (w/in my house) CI box… and possibly a staging server to host some Rails apps I was playing with. Anyhow, I had an old, unused box sitting in the basement – perfect!

I installed the latest Ubuntu bits, 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and had the box up and running in no time. However, as I intended to keep this box in the basement, without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse, I needed to be able to access and administer it remotely.

Granted, most of the work I’d need to do could be accomplished via SSH, but there were a few things I was going to need a GUI for – I needed remote desktop! Or just VNC. :)

Going headless

Ubuntu does support VNC out of the box, but you need to have an active X-Windows (Gnome, KDE, etc…) session already running before you fire up the VNC server.

But this was going to be a headless box! So short of hauling a monitor and keyboard to the basement every time I needed to bounce the box, which is rare, I had no way to get an X session started.

VNC Server, to the rescue!

To enable full GUI remote login you need a VNC server instance running on the box, and you need to launch an x session – I’m a Gnome guy myself, so we’ll go that route.

1. SSH into the box and install TightVNCServer
   • sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
2. Set Gnome to start when your VNC session starts
   • vi ~/.vnc/xstartup

   • #!/bin/sh
     
     xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
     xsetroot -solid black
     gnome-session &

3. Start the VNC Server
   • vncserver –geometry widthxheight –depth 24
   • You will probably be prompted to enter a password that you'll use later to connect to this VNC session... so enter one!
4. Start your VNC client on the remote machine, enter the password from step 3, and enjoy!

One side note. After logging into my VNC session I noticed that my keyboard mappings were all jacked-up. For example, typing asdf would result in abfh. After some searching, this appears to be an issue w/Gnome, but luckily I also found a workaround.

Oh… and you should probably be connecting to your VNC session via an SSH tunnel, but that’s a topic for another blog post… or use your Google-fu!