Background
I have setup TightVNC 1.3,9 on a 32 bits Debian 8 with Xfce Desktop and that works fine and currently in the process of setting up a new 64 bits workstation and here is the configuration
- OS: Debian 8 64 bits
- Desktop: KDE
- VNC Server version: TightVNC 1.3.9
TightVNC Server 1.3.9 is the default installation when
 > sudo apt-get install Tightvncserver
Starting VNC server under root account works fine but when the same server is started under other user account, the server crashes after a few seconds. There is no error in the session log under .vnc diretory. Did find the following error in a number of system log files including kern.log and syslog but no further information is available
syslog.1:Jan 23 19:18:17 PRJ001900DT08 kernel: [27620.744270] Xtightvnc[16211]: segfault at 7ffee656b000 ip 0000000000447f3a sp 00007ffee6569a60 error 6 in Xtightvnc[400000+177000]
Troubleshooting
Found a small number of old web posts (Resource 3) (TightVNC version 1.3.9 is released in 2009) suggesting that it is a known issue with version 1.3.9 but was fixed in 1.3.10, tried to install 1.3.10 but it is not available
> sudo apt-get install tightvncserver=1.3.10 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Version '1.3.10' for 'tightvncserver' was not found
1.3.10 source code is available (Resource 1) but build is required. I am not sure what the problem is as there is no further information available in the log – it could be a 64 bits issue (there are fixes to 64 bit Linux in 1.3.10 – Resource 2) or could be KDE issue. I did try to build 1.3.10 but due to short on time so I took the “shortcut” by purging TightVNC and install vnc4server package instead
> sudo apt-get purge Tightvncserver > sudo apt-get install vnc4server
If you do not want to purge TightVNC server, you can use xrdp instead i.e. you can connect using Remote Desktop instead (like connecting to any Windows server) – that uses Xvnc instead of Xtightvnc. The only issue with Remote Desktop to Debian is clipboard not working properly and there does not seem to be any solution for that.
Resources
- tightvnc.com – Download TightVNC (Previous Versions) –
- afterdawn.com – Version history for TightVNC –
- johnnylambada.blogspot.ie – Development Notebook – Post on “Sunday, December 04, 2011”