VNC still black screen with OpenSuse 11.3

English Network/Internet
1

Hi all,

VNC is still now working with xinitd.d. I have done a standard installation with KDE and start VNC with xinitd.d. The system is fully patched. The VNC client connects but the screen remains black. All hints on the internet (IPv6, displaymanger) don’t work for me.

Any hints or fixes?

Thanks
Chris

2

I just ran into this myself with the same version and all maintenance applied. I’ve tried two different VNC views and I get the same results, a black screen.

3

Is the screen blank running on the server?

4

There’s another similar thread to this at OpenSuse 11.3 VNC Black Screen /w Cursor then Timeout and at some point I came across this that “seems” to fix it.

First I ran the vncviewer localhost:5901 from a local gnome terminal running in the GUI and it worked. This is actually irrelevant to the solution but an interesting test.

The UVNC connection from my Vista machine still failed (black screen), so I then stopped the Linux firewall, the UVNC connection now worked! I then turned on the firewall again expecting it would stop working, but I was able to connect again…?? Then I tried restarting the Linux server, and tried the UVNC connection from my Vista machine, it still works…??

The only thing I can think of is some setting in the firewall was missing/wrong, and once there was a successful connection with the firewall down, it remembered this somewhere, and now it’s allowing whatever service is required to get the screen to actually display… yes I know, they’re not going to write up a KB article based on this explanation, but it’d be interesting to see if this works for others too…

BTW next thing I was going to do when I saw the firewall was the problem (and fully expecting it to resume being the problem once the firewall was up again) was to enable logging of rejected packets in the firewall log file so I can see if there were any clues there - never got to this.

Hope this works for everyone else…

Cheers
James

5

The fact the socket connects indicates the issue is not a firewall. This can be verified with the command

netstat -ant | grep 5901

and you should see output like

tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:5901          127.0.0.1:48574        ESTABLISHED

By the way, I use TigerVNC.

6

Yes in the firewall log during when UVNC was not working (same port 5901) I was seeing the connection coming in too, if you look in the other thread that I mention, at some point (sorry, it’s a LOONNNGGGGGG thread) the guy with the Monty Python foot avatar says something about some other service needing to get out, so it may be that the TCP connection is established on port 5901, but then whatever service on the VNC host that needs to get past the firewall to display the GUI is being blocked - again unfortunately (or not) my UVNC is now working, so I can’t set the firewall logs to show blocked activity. If you’re still having the problem try what I suggested just for the heck of it, if it still is not working then something else must have happened on my box, but perhaps you can set the firewall logs to show blocked activity/packets and see if you can get anything useful from there.

Cheers
James