[plug] VNC access to an Ubuntu machine (or perhaps XDMCP)

[Gregory Orange]

Hi all,
I'm dancing around a solution to this, but I'd like some advice from 
those who know more than I - probably most of you :P

At the other end of a VPN connection we have an Ubuntu virtual machine 
we'd like to access, preferably (due to my colleague's discomfort with 
command line) straight to a Gnome session. The 'source' machine is 
running Windows. Three options jump out:

(1) Use Ubuntu's System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop tool plus any 
old VNC viewer on the local machine. Works fine. Drawback: Must leave 
the system logged in.


(2) XDMCP (System -> Administration -> Login Window -> Remote) plus 
XMing's XLaunch. Sort of works:

(2a) Using 'one window' and 'start an XDMCP session' I get a 
wallpaper-only blank screen for a few minutes then "GNOME Settings 
Daemon failed to start". Removing .gconf* and .metacity etc then 
starting again doesn't help, and neither did updating 
gnome-settings-daemon past a bug which may have affected it.

(2b) Using 'multiple window' and entering gnome-session as the command 
to run upon XLaunch connecting, the resulting Gnome desktop is blocky 
and unwieldy and bigger than my monitor. Resizing or other such 
interaction doesn't work.


(3) VNC. A few ways to do this, but one partly successful method we used 
was to run tightvncserver on the remote machine, then connect to it with 
any old VNC viewer on the local machine. In ~/.vnc/xstartup I told it to 
run gnome-session, and it seems pretty good. Logging out leaves a 
'stale' session which seems to require restarting the vncserver to get 
it going again.


Option 3 seems the most promising so far. I'm looking for either 
troubleshooting tips on (2) (and possible the stale session in (3)), and 
advice on whether I'm going about this in totally the wrong way.

Cheers,
Greg.