VNC

Share your X11 desktop with VNC

If you want to expose your currently running X11 session over VNC use `x11vnc`.

simple

Just run it from the command-line with no arguments and then anyone can use a vnc client to use your desktop:

 x11vnc

add a password

If you want to add a password to make it a little more secure:

 x11vnc -passwd MYPASSWORD

It has lots of options to make password connections more secure, but this works well enough for a quick and dirty session.

Keep Listening

After the first client connection has exited x11vnc will also exit. If you want to keep the server running so that you can connect multiple times then use the -forever option.

 x11vnc -forever

.x11vncrc

You can save all these options in a dotfile called .x11vncrc:

 forever # keep listening for new connections after a client disconnects.

SSH Tunneling

Say you want to see the X11 desktop of a remote machine. Fire up SSH. This command does two things. It creates a tunnel for port 5900 between the remote and local host. It also starts x11vnc on the remote host.

 ssh username@remote.example.com -L5900:localhost:5900 ‘x11vnc -auth `cat ~/.Xauth`’

Now fire up a vnc viewer on your local host:

 vncviewer localhost:0

text mode VNC

Use linuxvnc to expose a text terminal to VNC clients. See also vncommand.