Arch Linux

everwisher

Member

Registered: 2019-09-11

Posts: 33

vncviewer shows black screen with nothing else but a clock

I'm running Arch on my homelab headlessly and the only graphics unit on it is intended to be passed through to some guests. Before binding the graphics unit to vfio, I made it accessible from other client devices via SSH.

As I want to run some desktop environment on my homelab, I have xorg, xfce4 and tigervnc installed and intend to access it using VNC. But when I ran the command vncserver on the host and tried to access it via tigervnc viewer on a Windows machine, a black window appeared with a clock on the upper right corner and nothing more happened. Context menu can be brought out using F8 key but none of the options ever gave any response.

Anyone can help me with this issue?

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,734

Website

Re: vncviewer shows black screen with nothing else but a clock

Did you setup tiger as shown on the wiki page?  If so, is ~/.vnc/xstartup +x?  Post the contents of it if so.  Also post your ~/.vnc/config and ~/.vnc/xxx.log

Last edited by graysky (2020-01-19 16:27:42)

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AUR packages • Zsh and other configs

everwisher

Member

Registered: 2019-09-11

Posts: 33

Re: vncviewer shows black screen with nothing else but a clock

Did you setup tiger as shown on the wiki page?  If so, is ~/.vnc/xstartup +x?  Post the contents of it if so.  Also post your ~/.vnc/config and ~/.vnc/xxx.log

Sorry to have left the forum for quite a long time for some other disciplines.

My ~/.vnc/xstartup is executable: 0755

Here's my ~/.vnc/config and I just found every line commented by default. I'll try to make sense of it:

## Supported server options to pass to vncserver upon invocation can be listed
## in this file. See the following manpages for more: vncserver(1) Xvnc(1).
## Several common ones are shown below. Uncomment and modify to your liking.
##
# securitytypes=vncauth,tlsvnc
# desktop=sandbox
# geometry=2000x1200
# localhost
# alwaysshared

Besides, here's the $HOST:1.log

Xvnc TigerVNC 1.10.0 - built Dec 27 2019 09:17:02
Copyright (C) 1999-2019 TigerVNC Team and many others (see README.rst)
See https://www.tigervnc.org for information on TigerVNC.
Underlying X server release 12006000, The X.Org Foundation

Sat Feb  8 10:52:21 2020
 vncext:      VNC extension running!
 vncext:      Listening for VNC connections on all interface(s), port 5901
 vncext:      created VNC server for screen 0
The XKEYBOARD keymap compiler (xkbcomp) reports:
> Internal error:   Could not resolve keysym XF86FullScreen
Errors from xkbcomp are not fatal to the X server
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 51: twm: command not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 52: xclock: command not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 53: xterm: command not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 55: exec: xterm: not found
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc: line 54: xterm: command not found

Finally, /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc

#!/bin/sh

userresources=$HOME/.Xresources
usermodmap=$HOME/.Xmodmap
sysresources=/etc/X11/xinit/.Xresources
sysmodmap=/etc/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap

# merge in defaults and keymaps

if [ -f $sysresources ]; then
    xrdb -merge $sysresources
fi

if [ -f $sysmodmap ]; then
    xmodmap $sysmodmap
fi

if [ -f "$userresources" ]; then
    xrdb -merge "$userresources"
fi

if [ -f "$usermodmap" ]; then
    xmodmap "$usermodmap"
fi

# start some nice programs

if [ -d /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d ] ; then
 for f in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/?*.sh ; do
  [ -x "$f" ] && . "$f"
 done
 unset f
fi

twm &
xclock -geometry 50x50-1+1 &
xterm -geometry 80x50+494+51 &
xterm -geometry 80x20+494-0 &
exec xterm -geometry 80x66+0+0 -name login

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,396

Re: vncviewer shows black screen with nothing else but a clock

So everything is working as intended, you simply don't have half of the sample utilities installed. Copy that xinitrc to your home dir. comment/remove the last 5 lines and add exec startxfce4 instead.

everwisher

Member

Registered: 2019-09-11

Posts: 33

Re: vncviewer shows black screen with nothing else but a clock

So everything is working as intended, you simply don't have half of the sample utilities installed. Copy that xinitrc to your home dir. comment/remove the last 5 lines and add exec startxfce4 instead.

Thank you for your help and I'll try it later. Actually, I don't have xclock installed but xterm is installed on the contrary, which is told by

pacman -Qs xterm

, though I can't execute it manually as zsh told me to use _xterm instead.