Black VNC screen, works w/ other guest VM

Question

I have two instances of OpenSuse 11.4 installed as guests under XenServer. The first one is running KDE and the second LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment).

I can connect via TightVnc to the KDE guest. When connecting to the LXDE guest the client window is black with an X cursor. Both systems have identical Xorg.conf files and identical xinet.d/vnc files. The logs show that xinetd is starting vnc on the LXDE guest. The LXDE process is running, and lxde.log doesn't contain any obvious problems.

I'm stumped, does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

Did you know that XenServer provides a VNC hookup to every VM it's running? You know "console" tab that shows you the main monitor in XenServer?, well it's showing those pixels over VNC! Tapping into this is pretty easy...

Look at this article that citrix provides, it describes how to do this from a Windows machine using putty.

If you are connecting from a Linux machine you don't need to putty, you can use the Linux SSH and VNC tools. Here's an example that will help get you started with that.

One note; this technique only works if SSH directly to the XenServer host. This makes it a little bit tricky if your not on the same LAN as the XenServer. If you would like more information about doing this through a router, when your at a different location, just ask and I can help you.

Let me know if you have any issues setting up putty / VNC!