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I've never used VNC before, although I used X11 about 25 years ago. I'm trying to set up a VNC connection between my Windows laptop and a box I ssh to from an external gateway.

From my Win7 laptop, I ssh to an Ubuntu gateway box, call it "gateway", and then I ssh to a blade with an IP that is private to the gateway. We'll call that "blade".

I also set up a local port forward from port 5901 on my Win7 laptop to blade:5901.

I installed "tightvncserver" on "blade" with apt-get and ran it with default options.

I then ran "tightvncviewer" on my Win7 laptop and connected to the server. It gave me a VNC screen with the following error dialog contents (slightly elided):

Xsession: unable to start X session --- no "/home/.../.xsession" file, no 
"/home/.../.Xsession" file, no session managers, no window managers, and no 
terminal emulators found; aborting.

From my ssh shell on "blade", I catted out a .xsession-errors file that said basically the same thing.

That tells me my port forwarding is working fine, but that I need to do some additional configuration on "blade".

So, what's the proper way to resolve this?

Update:

When I start the vnc server on the ubuntu box and then attempt the connection from the client, some information is written into "~/.vnc/:1.log". When I first saw this output, I saw it failing to find "~/.Xresources". I doubt this is an "error" per se, as there should be no requirement that I make X resource customization, but nevertheless I did "touch ~/.Xresources" and started again, and the log didn't have that error/warning anymore.

In any case, the log, which I'm showing the full contents of here, seems to just say things are going ok:

10/07/15 18:47:28 Xvnc version TightVNC-1.3.9
10/07/15 18:47:28 Copyright (C) 2000-2007 TightVNC Group
10/07/15 18:47:28 Copyright (C) 1999 AT&T Laboratories Cambridge
10/07/15 18:47:28 All Rights Reserved.
10/07/15 18:47:28 See http://www.tightvnc.com/ for information on TightVNC
10/07/15 18:47:28 Desktop name 'X' (bl12-kvm-nest:1)
10/07/15 18:47:28 Protocol versions supported: 3.3, 3.7, 3.8, 3.7t, 3.8t
10/07/15 18:47:28 Listening for VNC connections on TCP port 5901
Font directory '/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1/' not found - ignoring
Font directory '/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/' not found - ignoring
Font directory '/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/' not found - ignoring

10/07/15 18:49:18 Got connection from client 10.118.34.193
10/07/15 18:49:18 Using protocol version 3.8
10/07/15 18:49:19 Enabling TightVNC protocol extensions
10/07/15 18:49:21 Full-control authentication passed by 10.118.34.193
10/07/15 18:49:22 Using tight encoding for client 10.118.34.193
10/07/15 18:49:22 rfbProcessClientNormalMessage: ignoring unknown encoding 16
10/07/15 18:49:22 Using image quality level 6 for client 10.118.34.193
10/07/15 18:49:22 rfbProcessClientNormalMessage: ignoring unknown encoding -223
10/07/15 18:49:22 Enabling LastRect protocol extension for client 10.118.34.193
10/07/15 18:49:22 Enabling cursor position updates for client 10.118.34.193
10/07/15 18:49:22 Enabling full-color cursor updates for client 10.118.34.193
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  • Are there additional logs in the blade's ~/.vnc directory? They may be more informative. What exactly is a 'blade' anyhow? if it is headless (no physical display) then there may be additional packages that you need to install to get minimal X session functionality. Jul 10, 2015 at 22:40
  • I updated with the contents of the log. In addition to the log file, there's a "passwd" file with an apparently encoded value, and a "xstartup" script that runs "/etc/X11/Xsession" at the last step. Concerning whether I need additional packages, I suppose I can't say, but the vnc server isn't complaining about anything, it's just the client that is failing. I see X-related apps in /usr/bin, so it would seem like all of the non-headless stuff is there. Jul 10, 2015 at 22:58

1 Answer 1

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I was able to resolve this. The key was focusing on my ~/.vnc/xstartup file. Instead of running Xsession, I now have it run fvwm and it's working well enough now.

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