After saying how wonderful vnc was yesterday I came across a real weird problem today. Yesterday I was booting vncserver as root using:
sudo vncserver :1
as when I ran it as me I got:
pcw@intranet:~$ vncserver :1 cat: /home/pcw/.vnc/passwd: Permission denied xauth: error in locking authority file /home/pcw/.Xauthority xauth: error in locking authority file /home/pcw/.Xauthority sh: /home/pcw/.vnc/intranet:1.log: Permission denied sh: /home/pcw/.vnc/intranet:1.pid: Permission denied New 'X' desktop is intranet:1 Starting applications specified in /etc/X11/Xsession Log file is /home/pcw/.vnc/intranet:1.log sh: /home/pcw/.vnc/intranet:1.log: Permission denied pcw@intranet:~$
which is not good. Running as root had the problem that it was effectively a root login session, all processes were owned by root etc and I would rather run as me. Looking at file permissions the problem turned out to be because all those files were read-only for root so by deleting them I could run vncserver as myself.
But.
I connected with VNC and tried running the Synaptic package manager and it refused my password. What? I tried opening a terminal to run dselect and whatever I typed in came out as garbage. for example, the 's' key gave me a 'b'. Quitting out and running the vnc server again as root gave me no problems.
Eventually I found the reason. Under the Gnome preferences, root has the keyboard layout set to vanilla US but my own account had it set to UK which is what I asked ubuntu for when I installed it. Resetting the layout to it's default changed it to US and restarting gave me a functional keyboard: with UK settings including £ characters. Very odd.
Peter's Moblog
Hi Peter!
I've got the same problem here as you've described. But how did you reset your keyboard layout? I tried 'kbdconfig' and the option in gnome but none of the worked. How did you reset it? Could you lend me a hand, please!?
Greets, Andy
Ps: my first post vanished somehow...