Grumpyland Blog

How to Install VNC on Centos 6 (VPS)

Well, I usually don’t make these tutorials because there are often tons out there already available. However, I found the existing ones incomplete or inadequate to actually complete the task. So, this is meant to start from the very very fresh starting point.

First, let’s install essentials to run a VNC – the desktop.
You can choose any desktop environment you like, but this tutorial is going to focus with XFCE. (Who can afford to install Gnome/KDE on a VPS anyway?)

CentOS 6 min (version that usually comes with vps) by default does not come with specific desktop environment package information, so, we need to add that first if you plan to use any other than default.
For example for XFCE you need to…

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wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

Now you should have the package info for xfce4 and you can confirm this by doing either of below

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yum search xfce4
yum groupinfo Xfce

Next, install the actual desktop along with necessary parts for it.

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yum groupinstall Desktop Fonts Xfce

That will take a while…

Next, we move onto installing the actual VNC

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yum install -y tigervnc-server

We also need users to actually run the VNC environment since we don’t want to run it under root.

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useradd testuser
passwd testuser

now login to testuer via new SSH connection… or if you’re lazy…

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su -l testuser

Now create a password for your VNC

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vncpasswd

You should now be able to confirm that the vnc password file has been created

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cd .vnc
ls

should have ‘passwd’ in there.

Back on root now!!

You should now edit the VNC server configurations

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nano /etc/sysconfig/vncservers

If you don’t have nano, you can use any other editor or install nano as well.

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VNCSERVERS="1:testuser"
VNCSERVERARGS[1]="-geometry 1024x786"

This will allow the vncserver to start with a resolution of 1204×786 with testuser on :1.

Now start your VNC as root

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service vncserver start

It will run each vncservers you defined in the above file.

To stop/restart, you can…

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service vncserver stop
service vncserver restart

If you’d like your VNC to start at boot:

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/sbin/chkconfig vncserver on

And that’s it!

Please be warned that this is an unsecured line to your VNC. If you suspect that someone’s snooping on your traffic, be sure to secure it by having an SSH tunnel or similar methods. But I’m going to end my tutorial here.

~Grumpy

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With that done… You probably want to install some essentials to actually use the VNC. And bunch of really useful ones are in RPM Forge.
Below are two links for RPM Forge for 32bit and 64bit relatively.

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i686 http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.i686.rpm
x86_64 http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

You’ll need to download that and install it.

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wget [above link]
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.*.rpm

You can test that RPM forge is working by installing something like..

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yum install htop

Firefox

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yum install firefox

Flash Plugin

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yum install flash-plugin

etc…

The long delayed design for the website is here. And while at it, I’m ditching Mambo along with it. It’s heavy, it’s clunky and far more than what I need. To top things off, I really don’t feel like updating it. So, I’ve imported the blog posts on Mambo to this brand new and shiny WordPress! I’m not particularly in love with WordPress either. It formats my html in a strange awkward ways and prevent me from inserting lots of nice things like Google maps or Youtube videos without additional plugins. And once you get too many plugins, your website runs like… well, I guess that assumes it still runs.

In any case, I welcome you to this half dead blog which gets a post per two months or so in average. Not entirely sure why you are visiting either, but you are welcome. I hope you like the looks. It’s currently running off of Pixel theme by famfamfam and clearly edited by me to have the consistent looks. It’s a nice theme and also using it on one other place, but one thing I dislike is its poor support of tagless posts. Well anyways, it’s here to stay.

I hope you had a nice visit.
Bye now.

Click more!
(continue reading…)

Well, I wrote in April that I’m going to be putting up a new layout/design for this website. It’s November now and it clearly hasn’t happened. What happened? Well, nothing happened. That’s why it’s not here. I did try to do it for a couple of hours, then lots of more fun things jumped on me! Like games for example! I guess the priority of this website’s designs are just put on very low since the traffic here is barely existing anyways. (Why are you reading this?) But, I thought it would be worth while to at least mention on the progress of the job. It’s an indefinite hiatus. Or more likely, I will actually go with another design if I eventually and actually do make a new one.

The current layout as we see now is from Sitegrounds as a free Mambo template. To be honest, I really hate it, but out of the available options, it was the best one in my opinion. Naturally, it was only going to be a temporary solution to the look and feel problem, but with lack of time to devote on a new design, it pretty much stuck. I think it will have to be at least summer till I can bring out the new layout for this site. As the image might have given a clue, the theme is gonna be calligraphy!! Unique choice? Definitely.

Click read more to see sample!
(continue reading…)