How To Install and Access TightVNC Remote Desktop In Linux?

TightVNC is a very handy remote desktop application which is based on VNC protocol. TightVNC is mostly used for Linux systems in order to manage a remote desktop environment with GUI. In this tutorial, we will look at how to install and configure properly to run desktop environments like KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc. with TightVNC.

Install Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali

We can use the following command to install deb based distributions.

$ sudo apt install tightvncserver

Install CentOS, Fedora, RHEL

We can use the following command to install rpm based distributions.

$ sudo yum install tightvncserver

Start VNC Server

Now we need to specify a desktop environment for our VNC session. Actually, we have not created a VNC session yet but we will create a new one to create default configuration files. We run the following command by providing a password for the VNC session.

$ vncserver

We can see that during VNC server start a password is specified which will be asked to the VNC clients want to connect this VNC server. Then the question wheter we want to create a view-only password. View-only password can be used to only view VNC sessions but can not control it. New VNC server session is create with the number 1 which means the server port is 5901 which is also called as ubuntu:1.

xstartup Configuration File

All VNC Server related configuration is held in a file named xstartup which is located in the user’s home directory .vnc folder. Let’s print the default configuration. In this case, the VNC configuration file is located /home/ismail/.vnc/xstartup.

$ cat .vnc/xstartup

Set Desktop Environment For KDE

In order to enable KDE desktop environment with a new VNC session, we need to add the following line to the xstartup file.

startkde &

Set Desktop Environment For GNOME

In order to enable GNOME desktop environment with a new VNC session, we need to add the following line to the xstartup file.

gnome-session &

Set Desktop Environment For XFCE

In order to enable GNOME desktop environment with a new VNC session, we need to add the following line to the xstartup file.

startxfce4 &

Set Desktop Environment For LXDE

In order to enable GNOME desktop environment with a new VNC session, we need to add the following line to the xstartup file.

lxsession &

Kill VNC Server or Session

As we have started a VNC server or session to create default configuration files. We need to kill it we can kill the VNC server with the -k option and the session ID. In this example, we will kill the session ID 1 .

$ vncserver -kill :1

Start Server or Session

Now we can start a new server with the command vncserver where the default configured desktop will be fired-up.

$ vncserver

Connect with VNC Client

VNC servers start with port number 5900 and count one by one with the session ID. For example, if we have given session ID 3 the port number will be configured as 5903 . We can connect with a VNC client which is explained in the following tutorial in detail.

Best VNC Viewer Clients For Linux

192.168.115.123:5901