[SOLVED] Unable to remotely login to KDE with VNC

[Jim Cunning]

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On 05/13/2010 10:38 PM, Jim Cunning wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 12, 2010 18:32:14 Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
>> On Wednesday 12 May 2010, Jim Cunning wrote:
>>> I have a workstation at my office that I cannot login to using a
>>> local tightVNC and x11vnc at the remote system.  When I enter the
>>> password, my vncviewer window closes and after reconnecting to
>>> the remote system, the login screen is still present.  I know
>>> it's not a password issue, because this only happens when the
>>> correct password is entered.  If I'm already logged-in, there's
>>> no problem, even if the session was locked and required entering
>>> a password.
>>>
>>> I'm aware that gdm has a parameter (KillInitClients=false) to
>>> disable this behavior, but I also saw somewhere that KDE (kdm)
>>> does not use this.  I'm confused by this, because gdm is the
>>> process displaying the login splash screen.  Putting
>>> "KillInitClients=false" into /etc/gdm/gdm.conf and
>>> /etc/gdm/custom.conf has no effect.
>>>
>>> Anyone know where/what kdm needs to disable this behavior?
>>
>> I'm a little confused now - are you using gdm or kdm? Does simply
>> switching to the other help?
>
> Sorry for the confusion.  Since I'm using KDE4, I mistakenly assumed I
would
> end up using kdm.  Wrong--it's gdm all the way, from login screen to
actually
> running the KDE desktop after login.  Now, I'm really confused as to
why the
> gdm parameter "KillInitClients=false" doesn't work as expected.
>> I know this isn't quite what you want, but would using krfb until you
>> get this sorted be a viable workaround?
>
> Not really.  I've tried krfb in the past and found it REALLY slow
compared to
> x11vnc, plus it didn't (then at least) have the -scale option that
x11vnc does
> to permit squeezing a larger office desktop onto my laptop without a
bunch of
> scrolling.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion, though.
I wanted to look again at this long-standing problem, and reread the
x11vnc man page.  In the section on "-noxfixes" was the following:

Note: To work around a crash in Xorg 1.5 and later  some  people
              needed  to use -noxfixes.  The Xorg crash occurred right
after a
              Display Manager (e.g. GDM) login.  Starting with x11vnc
0.9.9 it
              tries  to  automatically  avoid  using XFIXES until it
is sure a
              window manager is running.  See the -reopen option for
more info
              and how to use X11VNC_AVOID_WINDOWS=never to disable it.

Despite this effort by x11vnc to not use XFIXES, it turns out the X
server was crashing and I hadn't noticed the evidence of a segfault in
/var/log/Xorg.0.log on failed logins with x11vnc.  I also found a
suggestion at
    http://www.karlrunge.com/x11vnc/faq.html#faq-display-manager

I don't know what XFIXES do, so I decided not to turn them off.
Instead, I used X11VNC_AVOID_WINDOWS=120, and it worked fine.

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