Tutorial

Installing GNOME and VNC on Fedora 19

Published on March 17, 2014

Fedora

Ashutosh Srivastava

Install GNOME Desktop Environment

To install GNOME desktop environment, login to your droplet using SSH or console and install GUI and GNOME desktop environment packages by following command:

yum -y groupinstall "GNOME Desktop"

That’s all! GUI and GNOME desktop environment is now installed.

Installing and configuring VNC server

After GNOME and GUI is installed, proceed to install VNC server:

yum -y install tigervnc-server

Now the TigerVNC server is installed. But to get it work, we need to configure it. TigerVNC configuration file has been replaced in new versions of Fedora so we need to copy it to desired location:

cp /lib/systemd/system/vncserver@.service
/etc/systemd/system/vncserver@:1.service

Now edit the VNC server configuration file “/etc/systemd/system/vncserver@:1.service” by following command (using nano editor):

nano /etc/systemd/system/vncserver@:1.service

We will be replacing the following lines of the file

` ExecStart=/sbin/runuser -l <USER> -c "/usr/bin/vncserver %i" `
` PIDFile=/home/<USER>/.vnc/%H%i.pid `

with:

` ExecStart=/sbin/runuser -l root -c "/usr/bin/vncserver %i" `
` PIDFile=/root/.vnc/%H%i.pid `

After you have done the above modification, press Ctrl+X to save the modified file in nano editor (type Y for yes).

Use following command to create a file /etc/sysconfig/desktop with some contents. If you won’t do this you will get grey screen upon connecting to VNC:

echo 'PREFERRED="$(type -p gnome-session)"' >> /etc/sysconfig/desktop

Set the password for VNC user:

vncpasswd

The VNC server is now configured. To enable and start it use the following commands:

systemctl enable vncserver@:1.service && systemctl start
vncserver@:1.service

To connect to the VNC server, download any VNC client on your PC or phone and enter your server droplet IP, server root username, and password. The default port for the VNC is 5901.

![](https://assets.digitalocean.com/articles/vnc_gnome_fedora/Screen Shot 2014-03-17 at 1.28.29 PM.png)

<div class=“author”>Submitted by: <a href="www.techmesto.com ">Ashutosh Srivastava</a></div>

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bpudiped • July 17, 2014

Hi -

Thanks for the blog. I tried this and couldn’t get into VNC. I first had problems with enabling VNC server with this command:

systemctl enable vncserver@:1.service && systemctl start vncserver@:1.service

Got this: “Failed to issue method call: Bad Message”

I just modified the command (by removing the first “1” from “1.service”)

systemctl enable vncserver@:.service && systemctl start vncserver@:1.service

Strangely enough, this seemed to work. It created an xvnc process.

I then tried to get in through vnc viewer … it spins for a while before saying “Timed out waiting for a response from the host computer.”

FYI on my droplet:

[root@ZF1 system]# uname -a Linux ZF1 3.13.9-200.fc20.i686+PAE #1 SMP Fri Apr 4 12:24:18 UTC 2014 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

a21852bf267634b8db7f0633120e56 • November 2, 2014

I tried this tutorial on a Fedora 20 droplet, and have not been able to connect to the VNC server. My VNC client just said that it could not connect to the server. I think I have had the same issue as @bpudiped.

amel • October 19, 2015

You might want to point out security implications, if any, when using VNC over an unencrypted network connection. :-/

Nathan Osman • February 3, 2016

Just in case this helps anyone in the future, I was able to get this working from a Fedora 23 server by running a couple of additional commands as root:

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port 5901/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

PsychoData • March 16, 2016

+1 to the firewall addendum in the post above! The darned firewall blocking stuff >.> I did it with iptables in my version though. With how the IPTables was setup already by default, the command i used was “iptables -A IN_public_allow -p TCP -s 0/0 --destination-port 5900:5902 -j ACCEPT” and this gave me 0,1,and 2 that i could run different sized displays on. Just remove the :5902 and change the port to 5901 if you’re following the above directions exactly!

techitdrew • January 5, 2017

You forgot to use iptables. You must accept the ports.