Featured AI Products
Compute
Build, deploy, and scale cloud compute resources
Containers and Images
Safely store and manage containers and backups
Managed Databases
Fully managed resources running popular database engines
Management and Dev Tools
Control infrastructure and gather insights
Networking
Secure and control traffic to apps
Security
Help protect your account and resources with these security features
Storage
Store and access any amount of data reliably in the cloud
Browse all products
AI/ML
CMS
Data and IoT
Developer Tools
Gaming and Media
Hosting
Security and Networking
Startups and SMBs
Web and App Platforms
See all solutions
Community
Documentation
Developer Tools
Get Involved
Utilities and Help
Become a Partner
Marketplace
Pricing

- Community
- DigitalOcean
- Community
- DigitalOcean

Grey pixelated screen when logging into server via VNC

Posted on April 8, 2018

I followed the VNC installation article instructions. Instead of installing xfce4 I went with ubuntu-gnome-desktop. Followed the rest of the install instruction, omitting startxfce4 & from the ~/.vnc/xstartup file because I didn’t install xfce4.

All the other steps went fine. I setup the connecting on my VNC client, Jump Desktop on iOS, and have a successful connection.

My problem is the following. I get a pixelated grey screen for a desktop. See linked image

Any ideas what I did wrong? I’ve done some digging online but nothing relating to this.

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Ryan Quinn

April 9, 2018

Accepted Answer

Your image link is broken but based on what you’ve described I think I know where you’re running into trouble. The current Gnome desktop is known to have issues with some remote desktop software and for it to work best, hardware accelerated graphics (which are not available on a droplet) is recommended.

The grey screen you are seeing is likely the default X.org view either because you did not include a line to launch a gnome-session in your xstartup file or because gnome was unable to start.

An alternative to VNC is to use X2go which generally provides better performance and tunnels over ssh by default so your connection is encrypted. From a clean 16.04 droplet this script will install and start x2go with xfce:

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script will set up an xfce desktop environment which can be
# accessed remotely via the x2goclient http://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:installation:x2goclient
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive;
apt-get update;
apt-get -y install software-properties-common xubuntu-desktop;
add-apt-repository -y ppa:x2go/stable;
apt-get update;
apt-get -y install x2goserver x2goserver-xsession;

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

View all products

Start building today

From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.