blank screen in Xvnc / xrdb can't open display - on Woody

[John Stumbles]

[3rd time lucky? apologies if you've seen this: NTLworld seems to be even
more pants than usual and to have lost my original usenet post and repost of
this message as far as I can tell, so I'm now trying through the mailing
list]

I'm trying to connect to my Woody (3.0r1) box from vnc client on windoze,
but I only get blank (textured) screen and X mouse cursor (initially in
centre of screen, then follows windows mouse cursor around when that enters
the vnc window).

When I run vncserver it says:

New 'X' desktop is Hostname:1
...etc...

Then .xsession-errors gets [re]written with:

xrdb: Connection refused
xrdb: Can't open display 'Hostname:1'


but why?
Googling produced one suggestion that it might be lack of a "Screen" section
in /etc/X11/XF86Config. I don't actually have an XF86Config file - mine is
XF86Config-4 - though symlinking it to XF86Config doesn't fix the problem.
The file does have a Section "Screen" (with DefaultDepth 16 and "Display"
SubSections with Depths 1,4,8,15,16 and 24 each with modes 800x600 and
640x480).

Anyway I'm running X successfully on the Woody box (with Gnome) so the
XF86Config should be OK, shouldn't it? (Though when I first booted my new
installation from floppy and tried to startx I had similar problems, and I
think I had to run dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 to get it to work OK.)

I think I read somewhere else that it could be an Xauth cookie issue, but
I've lost that piece and haven't a clue how to investigate that possibility.

Help!
[fx: OP slamming into brick wall :)]


tia
--
John Stumbles
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Pessimists are never disappointed

[Jonathan Dowland]

Post by John Stumbles
xrdb: Connection refused
xrdb: Can't open display 'Hostname:1'
I think I read somewhere else that it could be an Xauth cookie issue, but
I've lost that piece and haven't a clue how to investigate that possibility.

This sounds like a possibility. Are you trying to run xrdb remotely? Try
locally, and perhaps another app like xterm, locally. Try moving
~/.Xauthority for your user, restarting X and vnc and see if that makes a
difference (unless you know that you need this file for another purpose,
and make sure you don't weaken the permissions)

[Georg Nikodym]

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 19:04:42 -0000

Post by John Stumbles
I'm trying to connect to my Woody (3.0r1) box from vnc client on
windoze, but I only get blank (textured) screen and X mouse cursor
(initially in centre of screen, then follows windows mouse cursor
around when that enters the vnc window).
New 'X' desktop is Hostname:1
...etc...
xrdb: Connection refused
xrdb: Can't open display 'Hostname:1'

I've had this kind of problem attempting to get vnc servers up on
"older" boxen. My problem turned out to be that ssh was setting the
XAUTHORITY env variable. The solution was to unset it before running
vncserver.

-g

[John Stumbles]

Post by Jonathan Dowland

Post by John Stumbles
xrdb: Connection refused
xrdb: Can't open display 'Hostname:1'
I think I read somewhere else that it could be an Xauth cookie issue,

but

Post by Jonathan Dowland

Post by John Stumbles
I've lost that piece and haven't a clue how to investigate that

possibility.

Post by Jonathan Dowland
This sounds like a possibility. Are you trying to run xrdb remotely? Try
locally, and perhaps another app like xterm, locally. Try moving
~/.Xauthority for your user, restarting X and vnc and see if that makes a
difference (unless you know that you need this file for another purpose,
and make sure you don't weaken the permissions)

Sorry, I didn't understand that.

I'm running the vnc viewer on a different (windows) machine to the server
(which is on woody), but the error message (xrdb: Can't open display) is
generated when I run vncserver, not when I start the remote vnc viewer (so I
don't think the other, windoze, machine has anything to do with it).

I did try moving ~/.Xauthority and running vncserver. I get:

xauth: creating new authority file /home/user/.Xauthority

New 'X' desktop is Hostname:1

Starting applications specified in /etc/X11/Xsession
Log file is /home/user/.vnc/Hostname:1.log

but .xsession-errors still gets [re]written with

xrdb: Connection refused
xrdb: Can't open display 'Hostname:1'

With my new .Xauthority if I try running xterm I get
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Client is not authorised to connect to Server
xterm Xt error: can't open display: :0

If I switch back my .Xauthority to the original one and run xterm I get an
xterm on my local gui.

Incidentally my .Xauthority is -rw------; the original (which seems to be
created by my gui session) is size 418 but the one created when I run
vncserver is size 101.

Durr, i still don't understand: .Xauthority seems to be created by my
regular gui X session, and is not overwritten by vncserver's startup, though
vncserver will create its own (smaller/broken?) .Xauthority if none exists.
Is this what should happen? Is this the problem? (and if so, what is the
solution? :-)

tia

--
John Stumbles
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-+
I've got a book about motivation but I've never got round to reading it