# VNC from WinXP to LINUX - Anyone get this to work? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 27, 2002, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vnc-from-winxp-to-linux-anyone-get-this-to-work/110984 "2002-05-27T00:54:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Revtim](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/revtim/32/1042_2.png) [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2002, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vnc-from-winxp-to-linux-anyone-get-this-to-work/110984/1 "2002-05-27T00:54:56Z")
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/](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. ---
**Author:** ![Church\_Key\_Kid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Church\_Key\_Kid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Church_Key_Kid)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2002, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vnc-from-winxp-to-linux-anyone-get-this-to-work/110984/2 "2002-05-27T01:08:32Z")
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” ---
**Author:** ![Undead\_Dude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e19adc/32.png) [@Undead\_Dude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Undead_Dude)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2002, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vnc-from-winxp-to-linux-anyone-get-this-to-work/110984/3 "2002-05-27T01:18:37Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![Revtim](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/revtim/32/1042_2.png) [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2002, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/vnc-from-winxp-to-linux-anyone-get-this-to-work/110984/4 "2002-05-27T02:29:03Z")
Hey, that was it, thanks guys! I wasn’t specifying the desktop number when I started vncserver.