How to fix VNC in opensuse 11.2

Just to give a bit of background.. We have a load of PCs in the house.. 3 in the study, 1 in the kitchen, a couple of floating laptops and an old tablet PC acting as a media centre in the lounge.  It is the latter that has been the cause of my latest grief.  Having so many PCs means it is very expensive to upgrade everything to Windows 7.  I tried the early betas and the RC of Windows 7 on just about everything we had to see how it performed with different hardware and I have to say Windows 7 is awesome.

However, MS are still greedy sods and it costs way to much for a house hold like ours.  So the fall back is Linux.  Last week the Tablet PC laptop started to reboot every 2 hours anouncing the end of the RC period for windows 7.  Time to find an alternative.  My default Linux dostro is Ubuntu apart from failing to install the wireless drivers this generally detects everything and works a treat (once you get rid of that god awful orange and brown).

I installed Ubuntu on this aging Asus R1F and all looked good.  Movies streamed from my main Windows 7 machines and I nearly died when for a laugh I threw the toggle switch and discovered that the bluetooth AND the WIFI worked out of the box!! This is an amazing achievement for Ubuntu. So all was well in the world till we sat down to watch the latest Supernatural…  where was the sound!!

Yes, despite everything and all appearence of working Ubuntu had failed to make the inboard Intel HD audio work.  A long, long google session revealed loads of others in the same situations and a few people who claimed to have fixed the problem but no matter what I could not get this to work.  So NEXT…

My next port of call was opensuse.  I have never touched this before so was not sure what to expect and just to keep myself on the edge I went for the KDE option which I have also never touched.. in for a penny…

Install was a breeze and all seemed to work.. (actually I have not figured out if the wireless is working yet as I cant find where it is hiding the information)

More importantly the sound was working.. Hurray.  After a quick install of VLC media player I have a viable media centre PC again with SPDIF out (needed to run alsamixer in terminal and unmute spdif by pressing m)

One thing is does not do is to stream movies from my WIndows 7 machine.  If anyone know how to fix this shout.

My media PC is a small tablet that lives tucked away under the TV.  I don’t want to touch it if I don’t have to so I needed the equivalent to the brilliant Remote Desktop Connection software in windows.  After a quick google I am informed that VNC is built in and should be a doddle to use.  I checked with YAST and it was already installed and ready to go.  So at my windows 7 machine I installed the beta of tightvnc and dialed in the connection… nothing but a black screen and a cursor.  grrr.  3 Google hours later and i have finally found the solution.  So here it is..

The answer here is taken from here where one heroic poster (plodder) finally explained what needed to be done.

Well for those of you that are still interested in solving the original problem of making VNC work (rather than resorting to NX – good though that is), I think I may have found a solution. Thanks to Kimmeridgien for indicating the direction in which to go.

It does seem that the current version of TightVNC has a problem with IPv6 and this has been mentioned in some blogs at the TightVNC site. When you attempt to VNC to a Suse 11.2 host, xinetd invokes the command as specified in the Yast / Network Services (xinetd) / vnc1 entry, which is:

/usr/bin/Xvnc -noreset -inetd -query localhost -geometry 1024×768 -depth 16

The relevant part here is ‘-query localhost’, which I gather means ‘supply an XDMCP logon screen from localhost (127.0.0.1)’, the VNC server in this case. However, the server can only determine the IP equivalent of the name ‘localhost’ by looking in the /etc/hosts file. Unfortunately there are two possibilities, one for IPv4:

127.0.0.1 localhost

and one for IPv6:

::1 localhost ipv6-localhost ipv6-loopback

and TightVNC doesn’t seem to know which one to go for. The solution is to include a unique alias on the IPv4 line and then specify that the xinetd command should use that alias instead of ‘localhost’. Thus the /etc/hosts IPv4 line is edited to become:

127.0.0.1 localhost ipv4-localhost

and the arguments for the vnc1 xineted entry are changed, via the edit facility in Yast, to become:

-noreset -inetd -query ipv4-localhost -geometry 1024×768 -depth 16

After completing these two changes, you appear to be able to use VNC to the Suse 11.2 server without rebooting it. Note that you do not have to disable IPv6 in Yast / Network Devices / Network Settings for this to work.

Hope that helps.

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