Accessing my XFCE desktop with x11vnc

The following is probably old boring stuff for many, but I did not know it and it was astonishingly hard to google for it, so maybe it might be news for others, too.

This week I needed to access the desktop of my machine at home from the office. SSH access and X forwarding were not really sufficient options.

I remembered that a long time ago, KDE already had a "share this desktop" function, which would export the current desktop via VNC and even send an invitation with the credentials via email. As far as I know, GNOME has a similar feature. However, I'm using neither KDE nor GNOME but XFCE, and I could not find such a function. Additionally, I was not at the machine, so interactively setting up something was not really an option.

Finally I came across x11vnc. The short description says it all:

x11vnc allows one to view remotely and interact with real X displays (i.e. a display corresponding to a physical monitor, keyboard, and mouse) with any VNC viewer. In this way it plays the role for Unix/X11 that WinVNC plays for Windows.

This allows exactly what I needed. There is even a neat wrapper "x11vnc_ssh" in the openSUSE package that does the tunneling via SSH and everything else, so that all you need to do is:

• log in to your target machine via ssh
• call "x11vnc -storepasswd" (attention: this will store the password in ~/.vnc/passwd)
• log out and from your "viewer machine" call "x11vnc_ssh username@targethost"

Note that with my default 13.2 setup, x11vnc_ssh does use invalid options for vncviewer, so either update it from the  X11:RemoteDesktop repository, or just remove all options from the vncviewer invocation on line 75 of /usr/bin/x11vnc_ssh, just leaving

if vncviewer :$port $3; then break; fi

That's all you need to do to comfortably access your running desktop!

Now as I initially wrote, this is not really "news", but I still did not know  it before.