Unable to remotely login to KDE with VNC

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Friday 14 May 2010, Jim Cunning wrote:
> On Wednesday, May 12, 2010 18:32:14 Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> > On Wednesday 12 May 2010, Jim Cunning wrote:
> > > I have a workstation at my office that I cannot login to using
> > > a local tightVNC and x11vnc at the remote system.  When I
> > > enter the password, my vncviewer window closes and after
> > > reconnecting to the remote system, the login screen is still
> > > present.  I know it's not a password issue, because this only
> > > happens when the correct password is entered.  If I'm already
> > > logged-in, there's no problem, even if the session was locked
> > > and required entering a password.
> > > 
> > > I'm aware that gdm has a parameter (KillInitClients=false) to
> > > disable this behavior, but I also saw somewhere that KDE (kdm)
> > > does not use this.  I'm confused by this, because gdm is the
> > > process displaying the login splash screen.  Putting
> > > "KillInitClients=false" into /etc/gdm/gdm.conf and
> > > /etc/gdm/custom.conf has no effect.
> > > 
> > > Anyone know where/what kdm needs to disable this behavior?
> > 
> > I'm a little confused now - are you using gdm or kdm? Does
> > simply switching to the other help?
> 
> Sorry for the confusion.  Since I'm using KDE4, I mistakenly
> assumed I would end up using kdm.  Wrong--it's gdm all the way,
> from login screen to actually running the KDE desktop after
> login.  Now, I'm really confused as to why the gdm parameter
> "KillInitClients=false" doesn't work as expected.

So - does switching help? Have you tried using another VNC client? 
KRDC springs to mind for some quick tests...

> > I know this isn't quite what you want, but would using krfb
> > until you get this sorted be a viable workaround?
> 
> Not really.  I've tried krfb in the past and found it REALLY slow
> compared to x11vnc, plus it didn't (then at least) have the
> -scale option that x11vnc does to permit squeezing a larger
> office desktop onto my laptop without a bunch of scrolling.

That's nothing the server (krfb) should do, it's a client function. 
krdc does scaling and has done ever since I started using it a couple 
of years ago. I don't know about speed as I tend to use it over a 
direct connection where krfb's speed isn't really the limiting 
factor.

  --Reinhold