Black screen - vnc - Cinnamon server

[trapperjohn]

Firstly, thank you to the Mint team for this Unity alternative.

When running x11vnc server (or Vino) from Cinnamon, we can connect from another machine (Mint/Mate, Lynx) using Vinagre (or Remmina). I see the confirmation on the server. At the machine making the connection, we see a black screen.

Logging out the server then logging in again using a Gnome fallback session (no graphics) works fine. Also, when running x11vnc on a Mate machine, vnc connections to the Mate server work fine.

I sense that there is an ongoing bug with vnc with Cinnamon, presumably having to do with the underly Gnome 3 base. Googling this gives many hits, but a lot of Idonos and dead ends.

We need to be able to access the user's "as he/she sees it" desktop (no tightvnc for us). We would like to have our users use the Cinnamon flavor if they want.


Any ideas?

[trapperjohn]

Any ideas?

[eanfrid]

Is the Cinnamon machine physical or virtual (i.e. a Virtualbox or KVM guests) ? I had this issue only while connecting to this kind of remote machine. It is a VNC issue.

[trapperjohn]

Hi,

Thanks for you reply. Both the Mint Cinnamon machine and the Mate machine are VBox machines.

Perhaps it's a VBox guest additions or extension pack shortcoming.

I will try a native install of Cinnamon and post on VBox if it works.


I plan to migrate my host machines from Ubu 10.04 to Mint 13. Right now, I am leaning towards Mate.

[eanfrid]

There is something in Cinnamon/Gnome Shell 3D-accel that VNC does not like if it runs in a Virtualbox VM. I didn't investigate further since at this time I was only testing LM before installing it on a real machine. So, graphical performance was not my main concern.

I now connect to this real machine via adsl and wifi through a ssh tunnel and vnc works fine. BTW this is however a bit less smoother than a previous identical setup (adsl, wifi and ssh tunnel on the remote side) on the Windows 7 that LM13 replaced.

[zosorock]

I do have the same issue on a LM13 machine running Cinnamon. It is a physical machine though. Do you guys have any suggestions?

[trapperjohn]

Hi,

Since my original post, I have found that using x11vnc as the server application on the native install instead of vino gives me better results. X11vnc provides many command line control switches to fine tune the server (man x11vnc). Start out simple with something like: x11vnc -ncache -display :0

I also now use Remmina as my client application. Remmina better allows me to tweek the client resolution.

Give those a try.

On another note; I have mostly transfered to Mate on my native installs. It is essentilly glitch-free.