VNC from WinXP to LINUX - Anyone get this to work?

Factual Questions
1

I have a Windows XP machine (home edition) and a Red Hat LINUX 7.3 machine. They are both on a Linksys Cable/DSL router that provides DHCP services to both machines.

I can ping the LINUX box from the WIN XP machine, but I cannot get a VNC connection to work. VNC is “virtual network computing”, it basically allows one to open a PC Anywhere-like connection into the host machine. (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/)

I started the LINUX VNC server, and it appears to be running correctly in memory; I got no errors and a ‘ps’ shows it to be executing. When I run VNC viewer on the XP machine and enter the IP of the LINUX machine (which I got from the DHCP table from the router) I get “Failed to connect to server”.

The only literature I could find about VNC and Win XP is that you need to have “fast user switching” turned off, which I did with no effect.

Anybody have any ideas why this might be failing? I’m quite inexperienced with both of these operating systems.

2

You need to make sure that you have the ‘display’ setting right. If your VNC daemon on your linux box is running as display 0 or 1 (or whatever), you need to make sure you connect to that display number from your xp box, as in “192.168.x.y:1”

3

When you enter in the server name from your Win box, do you enter in the desktop number? For example, when I start vncserver on a linux box I get a message like this:

New ‘X’ desktop is asgard:1

The IP address for this machine is 192.168.0.8 in my case. If I were to enter this into vncviewer by address, I would need to enter 192.168.0.8:1

4

Hey, that was it, thanks guys! I wasn’t specifying the desktop number when I started vncserver.