You do NOT need a formal graphical logon for to use VNC. By
coincidence, Sir Santa railed against passwords in his blog last week,
and graphical signon typically means yet more passwords. Counter
productive.
Larry is right that you'll need core X windows support, but that
should have been drawn in automagically by YaST/zypper.
So ... once the needed pieces are in place, sign on with SSH and then ...
vncserver -geometry 1024x768
(You may prefer a different geometry.)
First time you start a VNC server, it will prompt for a VNC password.
(But no rant against this one because it is local only and can be used
more like a "key".) It should respond with ...
"New 'X' desktop is servername:1"
... where "servername" is the hostname of the server you're signed
onto. Set 'DISPLAY=servername:1' and export that variable 'export
DISPLAY' to child processes as needed. TWM is the default window
manager in my experience. Much much less pleasing than KDE or GNOME
or XFCE, but also much less overhead. It starts one 'xterm' by
default. You can run other apps as you please. (Just point your
DISPLAY variable, or run them from that XTERM.) Use 'yast2' for
graphical system config.
Then connect with any VNC client roughly like ...
vncviewer servername:1
I *always* tunnel my VNC traffic. But I'll defer discussion of
tunneling unless anyone cares to hear the details.
On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 6:45 AM, van Sleeuwen, Berry
<berry.vansleeu...@atos.net> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> We generally install our guests with only the most required packages. Since
> we never run X we obviously don't install that. We have installed our guests
> with an ssh based install so no VNC or otherwise graphical interface is used
> either.
>
> Our customer now want's a graphical interface in order to configure the
> machine. This is a SLES11 SP2 guest. I would like to activate VNC on the
> guest. I have VNC active but in order to get a graphical login I need to
> activate XDM. When I start /etc/init.d/xdm it responds "unused" and doesn't
> get started. In the /var/log/messages I can find: "/etc/init.d/xdm: No
> changes for /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers" and the same line for xdm-config. I expect
> it is missing some packages or some configuration but I can't figure out what
> it needs. Most documentation expect to have a full graphical installation in
> the first place so they expect all requirements on that part, both packages
> and configuration, are already available.
>
> In the past I have installed a guest through VNC. When installed this way the
> configuration will be suitable for a VNC connection. But this guest is a
> SLES10 machine. I try to compare SLES10 against SLES11 but there are some
> differences between them anyway so it hard to see what needs to be done this
> way.
>
> I have installed tightvnc and fvwm. Any requirements for this have been
> resolved by Yast during install of these packages.
>
> How can I get XDM to start?
>
> Met vriendelijke groet/With kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
> Berry van Sleeuwen
> Flight Forum 3000 5657 EW Eindhoven
> * +31 (0)6 22564276
> [cid:image001.jpg@01CE3508.E10AE080]
> [cid:image002.jpg@01CE3508.E10AE080]
>
>
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit
> http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For more information on Linux on System z, visit
> http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
--
-- R;
Rick Troth
Velocity Software
http://www.velocitysoftware.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For more information on Linux on System z, visit
http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
