vino problem, screen size and resolution

[yul.fany at gmail.com]

Hello everyone,
    I am using Ubuntu 5.10 and vino has been used extensively for
remote access. Recently, presumably after some updates, vino stopped
working well and the following is a summary of what happened.
    1. From a windows box, I couldn't log onto my ubuntu through
vncviewer. Basically, there seems to be a limitation on the length of
password I could type, so there was no way to type the password in
full length.
    2. Then I restart the ubuntu and the desktop environment looks a
little bit different on the Ubuntu machine. For example the icon for
"show desktop" is missing.
    3. Vino is working in some aspect. When I connect to Ubuntu from
an XP using vncviewer, the size of the screen is very small and I
cannot drag it bigger. Interestingly, those missing icons are back in
vncviewer.
    4. I though it might be related to screen resolution, so I tried
to change it through preferences->screen resolution (still using
vncviewer). Unfortunately it says "The X Server does not support the
XRandR extension. Runtime resolution changes to the display size are
not available." I am pretty sure I changed the screen resolution in
this way two weeks ago, but now ...
    5. I tried to reinstall vino, but synaptic says it couldn't copy
Xauthority file. I changed the property of my .Xauthority to 777 (this
seems to be a quick and dirty way at best), and this made synaptic
happy. But I need to insert CD to reinstall vino and I am away from
the Ubuntu. It is difficult to change the configuration of synaptic
repos remotely by vncviewer at this stage due to the small size of the
screen.
    6. Another puzzling thing is that there is green shade behind
every characters in the vncviewer rendering of Ubuntu desktop.

     I guess it might be helpful to reinstall the gnome desktop
environment, but still curious about the reason for all this strange
behavior. By the way, I am not sure which packages are to be
reinstalled to make gnome and vino back to the default setting.

      Thank you very much for reading this. Any advice will be greatly
acknowledged.



Best,
Liu Yu