vnc

[Preston Hagar]

On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 1:09 PM, Ric Moore <wayward4now at gmail.com> wrote:
> And therein lies a matter of confusion for me. Being an avid button
> pusher, synaptic offers a BUNCH of vnc servers and viewers each claiming
> to solve all of my problems for me and to heighten my experience. I just
> want to open a vnc client, in the OpenWonderland java project and see a
> desktop that is not the one I'm viewing from. I'm still trying to get it
> all straight in my mind. You and Stephan are getting me to the right
> place. I can see that.
>
> The darn thing keeps connecting to iam:0 using the vnc client. Then I
> get the hall of mirrors again. I can see that I'm going to need a larger
> stick and some grim determination to get this to work. Thanks SO much to
> you both. Ric
>

Honestly, from what it sounds like, I am not sure VNC is really what
you want (please correct me if I am wrong).  VNC is short for Virtual
Network Computing and is really designed to let you see the desktop of
one machine from another across a network [1].  If you are wanting to
have your programs on separate desktops to reduce clutter/make it
easier to see (say email and Firefox on one desktop and your Open
Wonderland on another), you might want to look into Virtual
Desktops/Workspaces.  Here is a decent article about it:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-9902034-68.html

It is already built into gnome (the default desktop environment in
Ubuntu), you may just need to turn it on, or learn how to switch from
one desktop to another (should be in the article above).

Another potential option I see is that you want/need multiple X
sessions.  The main benefit I could see from doing multiple X sessions
instead of using Virtual Desktops would be that the second X session
could be running a different window manager (say gnome in one, XFCE in
another) or no window manager at all.  The other major benefit I would
see would be that it would isolate that X session so that if your Open
Wonderland project crashed the X session, you would still have your
"main" X session up.  Here is some info about running multiple X
sessions using Window Maker:

http://maketecheasier.com/run-multiple-x-sessions-without-virtualization/2009/07/11

The short of it is to just run

sudo startx -- :1

from the command line and then press CTRL+ALT+F8 to switch to it.  It
should load up your default window manager (I think)

Anyway, maybe one of these two ideas will better solve your problem,
if you really think you need VNC, you might need to explain
again/more.

Preston