On Wed, 31 May 2006, Jordan Peacock wrote:

> Meaning they authenticate and bring up an X session. What I see is a 
> grayish background with the X server's 'x' cursor, but no login screen, 
> nothing of use anywhere to be seen.
>
> I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do, as most complaints regarding vnc 
> are getting it up and running or authenticating it, and no one is 
> responding on irc, so I figured I would test my luck here.
>
> Does this sound familiar to any of you who have used vnc? What does it 
> mean? How can I change it to get a login?


It is very familiar and certainly a RealVNC FAQ.  If you want to run Gnome 
or KDE, you can do that, but you have to set up your ~/.vnc/xstartup 
properly.  I've been running Gnome like this:

#!/bin/sh

xrdb $HOME/.Xdefaults
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -nowin &
exec autocutsel &
/usr/local/bin/rxvt -geometry 80x51+78+25 -ls -T "`whoami`@`hostname`" &
exec gnome-session &