3.1 VNC server installation and configuration

There are different type of VNC servers. The following list is based on package names of Debian distributions.

• vncserver: This is a “default” VNC server. This VNC server is quite flexible. Each “instance” of this server is essentially an independent GUI environment. Consequently, it can “split” a single machine to independent GUI environments for multiple users simultaneously.
• tightvncserver: This is kind of an enhanced version of the default vncserver. Tight VNC is VNC, but it supports very “tight” compression for situations when network bandwidth is limited. Not all VNC clients can utilize the extra capabilities of tight VNC. However, tightvncserver is backward compatible with plain VNC clients.
• x11vnc: vncserver (and tightvncserver) cannot relay the GUI environment that is actually displayed on screen to VNC clients. Yes, I know, this may not make much sense. But, that’s okay. x11vnc is a VNC server that mirrors the GUI displayed on the screen.
• linuxvnc: linuxvnc makes a VNC server that follows a tty (Teletype) screen. This is useful for systems that do not have any GUI environment installed for the other VNC servers to function. linuxvnc is particularly useful to relay a command shell to a VNC client.
• vncommand: vncommand is like linuxvnc, but it makes a VNC server out of any program that takes the “standard input” and the “standard output” files. This means that in a way, it is more flexible than linuxvnc. For example, you can connect vnccommand to an instance of pine (a text-based email client), then use a VNC connection to read email.

Of course, to learn how to use each VNC server, you can refer to the manual pages of the respective VNC server.

There are a few files that can be customzied for any VNC server. /etc/vnc.conf stores the default configuration of any VNC server. ~/.vncrc stores the configuration that is specific to a particular user. The directory ~/.vnc stores user specific files. The file passwd in this folder is used to store a password for VNC connection. This file is not a plain text file, and it cannot be created using a plain text editor. It is created and maintained by a utility program vncpasswd.