VNC minimal server on RHEL8 / CentOS8 / OEL8
With the update to version 8 (or, if to be accurate, according to common documentations, 8.3 and above), VNC configuration has had a major overhaul, and it is entirely different. Most documentations will refer to using ‘gnome’ as the desktop manager, however – if you want something lightweight with minimal impact (both package-wise and performance-wise), using the minimal ‘xinit-compat’ could work well for you.
To make it work, you will need to follow these steps:
Install the required packages
The required packages are xorg-x11-xinit-session, xorg-x11-xinit, tigervnc-server, metacity, xterm. All dependant packages need to be installed too, of course.
Configuration
The initial (and minimal) configuration required is to edit /etc/tigervnc/vncserver.users and add the required user with a display port. In this example, I have used ‘:1’. The content of the file should look something like this:
# TigerVNC User assignment
#
# This file assigns users to specific VNC display numbers.
# The syntax is <display>=<username>. E.g.:
#
# :2=andrew
# :3=lisa
:1=myuser
Then, set a vnc password for the user, using ‘vncpasswd’ as the user.
Then, create a file in the directory .vnc in the user’s home directory, called config, with contents such as this:
session=xinit-compat
securitytypes=vncauth,tlsvnc
desktop=sandbox
geometry=1280x1024
Now comes the tricky part (and not well documented) of setting the xinit startup script. Create a file in the user’s home directory called ‘.xsession’ with execution permissions, containing the following code:
xterm &
xterm &
metacity
This file is being read by xinit-compat, and will allow running a minimal desktop with two xterm windows, and a window manager (metacity).
Starting the service
Now, all that is required is to start the vnc service,. Use the command ‘systemctl start vncserver@:1’ . Note that the number ‘:1’ is in correlation to the file mentioned earlier ‘vncserver.users’.
This should do the trick. Let me know how it worked for you.
