Hi Bob question on getting TurboVNC running

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2025 at 10:18 AM Aaron D. Johnson <adj at ford.greeley.co.us>
wrote:

> What does the documentation say?  And what is different in the process
>

 Unfortunately, it looks like the documentation is fairly sparse.  I took a
look at it and couldn't
even see how to install it.

Aside: I agree with Aaron on the call about SSH adding overhead of
encryption.  I use
SSH for nearly every interaction on all my systems, and I'm copying files
at gigabit speeds
over SSH on top of a tailscale VPN.  Gaining public key authentication and
host verification
is a huge deal.  I don't ever allow password authentication on my systems
except at
the console.

Here are a few thoughts:

It looks like the developer of TurboVNC offers professional services and is
desperately
in need of funds, so you may wish to consider buying support from the
developer and
asking this question of them.  There is also a low-traffic user mailing
list that might be
good to ask on.

Next I'd start looking at the "xstartup.turbovnc" script.  Try adding some
debugging, possibly
a "set -xv" to the script to get runtime tracing of the run, but also look
at what the script
is doing.  In particular, it seems to interface with the environment, so
you may want to
check environment variables on the session where it works and where it
doesn't for things
like TVNC_WM, DESKTOP_SESSION, DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS,
DESKTOP_SESSION...

The message you are seeing seems to come from line 98 of
https://github.com/TurboVNC/turbovnc/blob/main/unix/xstartup.turbovnc
so some debugging and understanding of that script where it works and where
it doesn't
is likely to be enlightening.

The message you are seeing when it works comes from line 177.  Looks like,
from reading that script, the difference is when it works
"DESKTOP_SESSION=xubuntu".
But there may be some other settings that are influencing it.

I imagine when you say you are "at the console" vs "telnet", you are in an
X session on
the console?  That is likely providing some environment settings that is
telling the
xstartup.turbovnc to use "xubuntu", where the telnet session is triggering
the block
of code above where it tries "the default window manager".

I mean, one option is to, where it works, do "set >itworks", and then from
the session where
it does not work do "source itworks" to blindly set the environment to
match (though that might
cause other issues).

Sean
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.nclug.org/pipermail/nclug/attachments/20250219/9c91e2bb/attachment.htm>