Sam Lesher

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.” - Emo Philips

Ubuntu 7.04 - Enable/Disable Remote Desktop from the Command Line

First, enable Remote Desktop in Gnome by going to System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop.

Check ‘Allow other users to view your desktop’.
Check ‘Allow other users to control your desktop’.
Uncheck ‘Ask you for confirmation’.
Type in the password you want to use.
Click Close.

Remote Desktop is now running on your machine.

Now, open a terminal and type this command:

$ gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled false

Go back to System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop. You will see that it is now turned off.

You can turn it back on from the command line using this command:

$ gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

The reason I find these commands handy is that I like to only turn on Remote Desktop when I actually need to use it. So, after I set up SSH and secure it, I then log into my machine remotely via SSH and run the command to enable Remote Desktop. Once I do that, I can then open up VNC Viewer from the remote machine, and do what I need to do. I then disable Remote Desktop via SSH with the disable command so that the server is no longer available to myself or anyone else that might try to access it.

I have taken this a step further on my machine and simplified this process by creating two bash shell scripts:

startvnc.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script starts enables System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled true

stopvnc.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script starts enables System -> Preferences -> Remote Desktop

gconftool-2 -s -t bool /desktop/gnome/remote_access/enabled false

After creating those scripts, I make them executable with this command:

$ chmod +x startvnc.sh
$ chmod +x stopvnc.sh

I then make aliases to them. Open ~/.bashrc in a text editor, scroll to the bottom, and type in these two lines:

alias startvnc=/path/to/your/startvnc.sh
alias stopvnc=/path/to/your/stopvnc.sh

Now, when you SSH into your box (or open a command line), you can just type $ startvnc to enable Remote Desktop, or $ stopvnc to disable Remote Desktop.

*Remember, if you are behind a firewall, you have to allow access through port 5900 if you want to Remote Desktop into your default display (:0).

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