How to configure xstartup for Ubuntu Budgie?

Question

I have Ubuntu 16.04.2 installed in a virtual server (bhyve/iohyve under a headless freenas), and am trying to install Ubuntu Budgie as a desktop environment. I used:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:budgie-remix/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install budgie-desktop

to install Budgie. I then install tigervnc and VNC-ed in, to be greeted by a grey screen and a white terminal. After some googling around I found out I need to configure the .vnc/xstartup file, but I'm not sure what to modify it to. I tried to make the file as

#!/bin/bash
xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
start budgie-desktop &

with or without space between budgie and start, or using ubuntubudgie, ubuntu-budgie, and so on. So far everything led to just a gray screen. I read somewhere to try xstart from the command line, but that command is not found.

I also tried a plain old gnome-session for the above script, as well as copy-pasting the script from here.

I also checked /usr/bin/budgie-desktop:

#!/bin/sh

BUDGIE_VERSION="10.3.1"

    if [ "$1" = "--version" ]; then
    echo "budgie-desktop $BUDGIE_VERSION"
    echo "Copyright © 2014-2017 Ikey Doherty, Solus Project"
    exit 0
fi

if [ -z $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP ]; then
  XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Budgie:GNOME
  export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
fi

exec gnome-session --session=budgie-desktop $*

and messed around with gnome-session --session=budgie-desktop in various variations, but still no luck.

If anyone has any suggestions I would highly appreciate it.

Answer 1

I ran into the exact same issue, turns out if you try to start budgie-wm from a xterm running inside the VNC, it tells you that tight VNC doesn't support RANDR.

I uninstalled that and installed tigerVNC (which is I believe the community continuation of tightVNC), which does support RANDR. Works flawlessly now.