Yeah, I know, back to basics with Ubuntu. This took me longer than it ever should have, so I’m just posting my travails here. I wanted to make my Ubuntu server essentially headless where I don’t have a keyboard, mouse, or monitor hooked up to it. Obviously this means remote desktop capabilities.

Sadly, the obvious and most often-used tools to accomplish this either require me to remote logon with my Ubuntu laptop (yuck!) or require a session to already be logged on the server locally (yuck!). Well, I want to be able to remote in, even at the logon window after a reboot! Here are my steps.

sudo apt-get x11vnc vnc-common
sudo x11vnc -storepassword password /etc/x11vnc.pass
sudo gedit /etc/X11/gdm/Init/Default
add this at the bottom just above exit 0:
/usr/bin/x11vnc -rfbauth /etc/x11vnc.pass -o /tmp/x11vnc.log -forever -bg -rfbport 5900
sudo gedit /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf
change #KillInitClients=true to KillInitClients=false
reboot

I’ll probably end up changing this all up once I decide to wrap this inside SSH, but since this will always be local (unless I VPN in remotely), I’m not as concerned about this setup. I might just tunnel it through SSH just to make sure I can do so with this setup.