VNC on ubuntu via CLI

2020-11-20 286 words 2 minutes

Contents

By default a fresh ubuntu install comes without ssh nor vnc.

If installing ssh is as easy as

sudo apt install ssh

enabling VNC via command line is not so trivial.

Just follow these steps as a regular user, superuser provileges are required only for some of them.

Make sure we have the vino package installed

sudo apt install vino

User intervention (optional)

Disable any user intervention for establishing the connection (the default configuration requires an user to accept a remote connection)

gsettings set org.gnome.Vino prompt-enabled false

Disable connection notification (optional)

You can disable the connection notification popup.

gsettings set org.gnome.Vino notify-on-connect false

Set VNC as view-only (optional)

Maybe you don’t want to interfere to what the user is doing.

gsettings set org.gnome.Vino view-only true

Encryption (optional)

Sadly a lot of VNC clients doesn’t support encryption, this is to get rid of it

gsettings set org.gnome.Vino require-encryption false

Authentication

Just choose if you want it without any password request or a specific password.

No password authentication

gsettings set org.gnome.Vino authentication-methods "['none']"

Fixed password authentication

Replace “mypassword” with a sensible one

gsettings set org.gnome.Vino authentication-methods "['vnc']"
THEPASS=$(echo -n mypassword | base64)
gsettings set org.gnome.Vino vnc-password "$THEPASS"

Start the server

The VNC server is bound to a network connection profile. First, we have to get the id of the profile:

nmcli connection show

NAME                    UUID                                  TYPE      DEVICE
Connessione via cavo 1  6a2988c0-3a73-37a7-943a-7529bcd78462  ethernet  ens160
Connessione via cavo 2  628a3436-7e7f-3299-abca-664418ffb382  ethernet  ens192

And then we can bind the vnc server to a single connection:

dconf write /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/sharing/vino-server/enabled-connections "['6a2988c0-3a73-37a7-943a-7529bcd78462']"

Or to multiple connections:

dconf write /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/sharing/vino-server/enabled-connections "['6a2988c0-3a73-37a7-943a-7529bcd78462','628a3436-7e7f-3299-abca-664418ffb382']"

Manually Start the server

With this commands you can manually start the server, without relying on network profile association:

export DISPLAY=:0
/usr/lib/vino/vino-server &