Configuring Remote Desktop

From Crashcourse Wiki

1 The "vino" package
2 Configuring Remote Desktop
3 So what's going on underneath?
4 So where's this configuration information?

[edit] The "vino" package

Remote Desktop is based on the vino package, which is almost certainly installed already:

$ yum info vino

[edit] Configuring Remote Desktop

Graphically, you can configure remote desktop access via the GNOME menu selections:

System
    Preferences
        Internet and Network
            Remote Desktop

where you can set your configuration choices:

Allow other users to view your desktop?
Allow other users to control your desktop?
Ask you for confirmation?
Require the user to enter a specified password?

That's all pretty straightforward, isn't it? And note that the password you configure here is entirely independent from any VNC password you might have set on another occasion.

Once you've configured this (and opened incoming port 5900) and allowed Remote Desktop access, remote users need type only:

$ vncviewer <your IP address>:0

and they should get a VNC-like window of your desktop.

[edit] So what's going on underneath?

As mentioned above, Remote Desktop is built on top of the vino package, which contains the executable /usr/libexec/vino-server, the program that runs and listens for incoming requests on port 5900. So once you configure Remote Desktop to allow access, you might want to verify that vino-server is actually running:

$ ps aux | grep vino
...
rpjday   30805 11.8  1.3  83540 13980 ?        R    16:22   1:59 /usr/libexec/vino-server ...
...

Good. In addition, the vino package contains the configuration program vino-preferences, which is simply the graphical program you should remember from above.

[edit] So where's this configuration information?

Your personal (per-user) Remote Desktop configuration information is stored in the file ~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/remote_access/%gconf.xml, as in:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
        <entry name="view_only" mtime="1201036964" type="bool" value="true">
        </entry>
        <entry name="vnc_password" mtime="1201034841" type="string">
                <stringvalue>ZnJlZA==</stringvalue>
        </entry>
        <entry name="authentication_methods" mtime="1201036965" type="list" ltype="string">
                <li type="string">
                        <stringvalue>none</stringvalue>
                </li>
        </entry>
        <entry name="prompt_enabled" mtime="1201016763" type="bool" value="false">
        </entry>
        <entry name="enabled" mtime="1201036963" type="bool" value="true">
        </entry>
</gconf>

Given that the above is simply a text file (and that its contents are reasonably straightforward), this means that you can log in to your account from a remote system and configure Remote Desktop from the command line simply by editing that file -- a very handy feature.

The only trick is that the password is not stored in plain text, but is encoded as base64, so it's a trivial matter to convert a plain text password to its base64 equivalent, and save that text in the file:

$ echo -n fubar | base64
ZnViYXI=                <-- what to store in the file
$

As an alternative, you can also configure any of your personal GNOME config files with gconftool-2, but that's left as an exercise for the reader:

$ man gconftool-2

Retrieved from "http://www.crashcourse.ca/wiki/index.php/Configuring_Remote_Desktop"

Configuring Remote Desktop

From Crashcourse Wiki

Contents

[edit] The "vino" package

[edit] Configuring Remote Desktop

[edit] So what's going on underneath?

[edit] So where's this configuration information?

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