How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

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garynl

How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by garynl »

I have recently installed Linux Mint 17 xfce edition on a relatively old PC. It's fantastic, it does exactly what I want and looks great. I will be accessing the machine most of the time via VNC so I installed tightvnc and worked out how to start xfce (using the command startxfce4 in the xstartup file). However, the desktop displayed in the remote vnc viewer has a completely different look and feel to the local desktop.

I have searched the web trying to find out how I can get desktop displayed in the vnc viewer to be the same as the local desktop, but I have been unable to distill a solution from all the posts I have read. Common sense says it must be straight forward because the configuration must be already on the machine somewhere; I guess I just need to know how to specify where xfce should look.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?
thanks
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
garynl

Re: How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by garynl »

I logged onto the machine locally today and to my horror the original mint desktop had been replaced by the one I had seen in the vnc viewer. I re-read a number of other of the posts, and this time they made a little more sense. I now know what the Whisker menu is and once I had realized that it was just a plugin for the panel, I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I had a play with the panels, removed the extra one and put the main panel at the bottom of the screen. It didn't take me long to realize this was going to be a lot of work just to restore what appeared to be the default Mint desktop.

So is there a simple way of restoring the original desktop? (without re-installing).
Is there a way of preventing this happening in the future? (if I have to re-install I only want to do it once)
sabrown

Re: How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by sabrown »

I would also be interested in an answer to this. I am testing NX 4 with Mint 17 XFCE, and the mint customizations are not getting loaded. Its usable but I would like to get my desktop in these remote sessions.

Is there a script that needs to run ?

Thanks
sabrown

Re: How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by sabrown »

Also I can confirm that with NX the desktop is permanently altered. Is there an easy way to get the Mint desktop back ?
sabrown

Re: How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by sabrown »

The desktop appears to have lost titlebar widgets and dialog boxes, and now its getting to the point where its not usable. Does anyone know what the process is for adding the Mint decorations to XFCE ?
sabrown

Re: How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by sabrown »

Looks like the same as this bug :

https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/1348091

Can someone give us a clue as to what is running to set up Mint Desktop on XFCE so we can at least recover from this ?

I have been looking through the package installed files etc and nothing seems to be obvious.

Also, my login is permanently broken - I have to run the xwfm4 manually
garynl

Re: How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by garynl »

Ah well, I cant wait any longer.
I tried the LM17 MATE edition and it works just the way you would expect: open a vnc connection and you get the MATE desktop.
Fortunately I have the option to switch to MATE, others may not. I originally opted for xfce because its a lightweight window manager; too light it seems. I'll take the hit on performance because MATE just works.
sabrown

Re: How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by sabrown »

Issue #1
Logout does not clean up window manager, on next login it cannot connect the already running window manager and tries to create a new one but often it cannot
It also overwrites some of my configurations in ~/.config/xfce with non-minty defaults ( almost always xfce-panel.xml is overwritten, sometimes the keyboard and display setup too ) from somewhere

To recover
- Created a new user
- logged in as that user
- copied contents of its ~/.config/xfce to mine, and made backups

Now when it craps out on login, I go to tty2, clean out ~/.cache/sessions, restore saved copies of xml configs in ~/.config/xfce, then kill the parent process of the window manager, which pops me back to MDM login screen. Login and I have my desktop back..

Can anyone give any help with confused is going on here ? Any Mint or xfce devs out there ?
dover19

Re: How do I get the Mint xfce desktop via VNC?

Post by dover19 »

Seems like this issue is all too common. This is the thirs post I've ran into about this and there are no answers. I don't want to have to re-install simply to get my desktop back.
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