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Before setting up your Red Hat VMs for VNC, be sure that you have installed the Linux guest agent. See the
section called “Installing the Linux guest agent” for details.
To configure VNC on Red Hat VMs, you need to modify the GDM configuration. The GDM configuration
is held in a file whose location varies depending on the version of Red Hat Linux you are using. Before
modifying it, first determine the location of this configuration file; this file will then be modified in a number
of subsequent procedures in this section.
Determining the location of your VNC configuration file
If you are using Red Hat Linux version 4 the GDM configuration file is /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf. This is
a unified configuration file that contains default values as specified by the provider of your version of GDM
in addition to your own customized configuration. This type of file is used by default in older versions of
GDM, as included in these versions of Red Hat Linux.
If you are using Red Hat Linux version 5 the GDM configuration file is /etc/gdm/custom.conf. This is
a split configuration file that contains only user-specified values that override the default configuration. This
type of file is used by default in newer versions of GDM, as included in these versions of Red Hat Linux.
Configuring GDM to use VNC
1. As root on the text CLI in the VM, run the command rpm -q vnc-server gdm. The package names
vnc-server and gdm should appear, with their version numbers specified.
If these package names are displayed, the appropriate packages are already installed. If you see a
message saying that one of the packages is not installed, then you may not have selected the graphical
desktop options during installation. You will need to install these packages before you can continue. See
the appropriate Red Hat Linux x86 Installation Guide for details regarding installing additional software
on your VM.
2. Open the GDM configuration file with your preferred text editor and add the following lines to the file:
[server-VNC]
name=VNC Server
command=/usr/bin/Xvnc -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768 -depth 16 \
-BlacklistTimeout 0
flexible=true
• With configuration files on Red Hat Linux 3 and 4, this should be added above the [server-
Standard] section.
• With configuration files on Red Hat Linux 5, this should be added into the empty [servers] section.
3. Modify the configuration so that the Xvnc server is used instead of the standard X server:
• If you are using Red Hat Linux 3 or 4, there will be a line just above that reads:
0=Standard
Modify it to read:
0=VNC
• If you are using Red Hat Linux 5 or greater, add the above line just below the [servers] section
and before the [server-VNC] section.
4. Save and close the file.
Restart GDM for your change in configuration to take effect, by running the command /usr/sbin/gdm-
restart.