Where are my Menus?- Peter's Blog

Where are my Menus?

Submitted by Peter on Thu Mar 27 2008 09:11 5 months ago

My home server currently has no monitor attached (new video card today?) and it would be useful to have access to a gui, mainly for the benefit of mythtv where not everything can be done from the command line.

I suddenly realised there is an easy way to get a remote desktop, good old vnc.

So I installed the tightvncserver package and started it with

vncserver

and sure enough I had a remote desktop but a very stark one with nothing but a terminal window, none of the gnome desktop panels (i.e. the gnome equivalent of the 'start' menu, taskbars etc).

Some research determined that these could be added thusly:

edit ~/.vnc/xstartup
add this at the bottom:
```
gnome-panel 2> /dev/null &
```

The background is still stark (grey, no wallpaper etc) but that is ok for a vnc connection. The important thing is that the menus are there.

I'm editing this via firefox on the remote desktop using vnc over an ssh tunnel. I'm trying to think of ways to get more links in the chain.

Filed under: ubuntu vnc

Spikeles Says:

Fri Mar 28 2008 03:33 5 months ago

Use 'exec gnome-session' instead, it will cause a full gnome session to start

Peter Says:

Fri Mar 28 2008 09:11 5 months ago

I need to understand all this more. What does a full gnome session give me? And I'm not talking Warlocks.

Peter (aka X noob).

Kaerast Says:

Sun Mar 30 2008 12:17 5 months ago

If you're running locally, then you don't need vnc at all. Just use SSH's X forwarding ability eg. 'ssh -X user@remotehost firefox'

Spikeles Says:

Mon Mar 31 2008 00:07 5 months ago

X is made up of a bunch of components. Usually it starts with the server, and the client, then the window manager, then possibly even a session manager. The session manager is responsible for saving and restoring open windows and settings and such. When you run gnome-panel is starts and runs the gnome-panel application, but not the window manager or session manager, drag and drop may not work for example because the default window manager (probably twm) may not support it. Running gnome-session will start a full gnome session. The gnome window manager, the sessions, the libraries and everything. Here's some light(hehe.. light) reading that may help. http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/XWindow-Overview-HOWTO.html

Peter Says:

Mon Mar 31 2008 07:36 5 months ago

Kaerast: I use vnc from a windows box. However since my home desktop is now linux, I will revisit remote X.

Spikeles: thanks for the info, I'll look into it.

Peter

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