Ronnie Tucker

I plan on using my EEE at work and thought it’d be nice if I could control my home PC from work, through the EEE.

First stop was dyndns.com to get a free ‘IP to nice name’ ™. Rather than typing in a long IP address (which may change in time) I can just type in a more memorable URL instead. Nifty!

On the home PC I fired up the package manager and installed vncserver.

I assumed port forwarding would be necessary so I went in to the admin panel of my Netgear wireless and forwarded ports 5900-5901 and 5800-5801 (the default ports for VNC).

Services menu in my router (above) to forward ports

 

Firewall Rules menu in the Netgear (above)

 

Now on the EEE I installed vncviewer.

On the home PC I opened a console and did:

vncserver :1

To create a new desktop (:1) to connect to then on the EEE I used:

vncserver IPADDRESS:1

to connect, but for the life of me I just could not get it to connect. I kept getting a ‘Connection Refused (111)’ error.

After more hair pulling I remembered the Remote Desktop feature that’s built in to KDE, so I loaded that up.

Nothing much in there. But in the Desktop Sharing application you can set up a personal invite but what we want to do is click Configure and set a password.

Desktop Sharing (above)

 

In a console (on the EEE) I entered:

vncviewer IPADDRESS:1

This time it connected! Then it booted me off, giving me an error about Rect too big (?) which was confusing.

‘Rect too big’ error (above)

 

After more searching I tried something else:

vncserver

(note, no :1)

This loads up a small VNC window where you put in the IP, much nicer!

VNC window asking for IP (above)

 

So I put in my IP address (again, no :1) but this time got curious and clicked the button to edit the Options.

VNC Options window (above)

In there it allows you to edit the amount of colours that it will use to display the remote desktop, I chose Full (colour) and to the left of that I noticed a bit mentioning Hexfile, I noticed something about that in the ‘Rect too big’ error message so, being a self confessed tinkerer, I turned off Auto and chose ZRLE. Ok, back to the little window with my IP, I clicked OK and…

… up popped a window on my KDE desktop saying someone is trying to connect and do we allow this, course I do, it’s me! Up popped a window on my EEE asking for a password…

VNC asking me for the connection password (above)

 

KDE telling me that a remote user is connected! (above)

 

… it worked!

I can see my home PC desktop on my little EEE screen! When I moved the mouse pointer on my EEE it moved the pointer on my home PC! Amazing!

My KDE desktop on my home PC… (above)

…my home PC desktop showing on my EEE in VNC (above)

 

My one last problem was to stop it asking me permission, it’s no good asking if it’s ok when i’m about three miles away in work!

In the Remote Desktop Control window (above) is a check box for ‘Confirm uninvited connections before accepting’, remove that tick from that box and it will automatically accept.

I probably didn’t need to install vncserver at all (in hindsight) since I seem to be using the Krdc element of KDE itself.

Oh well, but at least it works!

And to prove it, I have a video of the EEE controlling my Kubuntu desktop PC!