How to start VNC server on start-up in Ubuntu 10.04

Question

I've been struggling with this long enough to ask yet another startup script question.

I've got a startup script that is relatively simple, ie:

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          startVNC
# Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      
# Short-Description: Start VNC server at boot time
# Description:       Test
### END INIT INFO

#!/bin/sh
echo "JOB RUN AT $(date)"
echo "============================"
echo ""
/usr/bin/vncserver -geometry 1280x1024 -depth 24

Obviously it's only the last line that's really important. The script is executable, ie.

ls -l startVNC

yields:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 406 2011-12-07 15:45 startVNC

When I execute it when logged in over ssh as my_user vncserver starts and I am able to see the GUI from my desktop. So then I tried 5 things to make it run on start-up:

Copying my script to /etc/init.d/, calling update-rc.d -f startVNC defaults (also with 99 after defaults to make sure everything vncserver depended on is already running). I checked all the generated symbolic links were there in the /etc/rcX.d/ folders. But it didn't work on reboot or start-up
Adding my script to /etc/rc.local before exit 0
Adding to crontab -e as @reboot /home/my_user/scripts/startVNC
Adding my script to /etc/init.d/rcS
Adding my script to System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications in Gnome

but none of them worked. What more can I check. Is there an error in my script maybe? I guess the process'es owner has to be my_user for it to work, but I have no idea how to debug it.

Any clues appreciated.

Note that your shebang (the line that starts #!) has no effect, when it's not the first line of the file it's just another comment. — Kowh
– Kowh, Commented Dec 8, 2011 at 0:06

tohuwawohu · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-07 16:11:15Z

6

You could use su[YourUserName]-c /usr/bin/vncserver to run the vncserver as user, not as root.

Another point: In your script, there's no difference between starting and stopping the VNC server. Usually, a init script would use different cases to start/stop the service:

case "$1" in
    start)
    # code to start the application
    ;;

    stop)
    # code to stop the application
    ;;

    restart)
    $0 stop
    $0 start
    ;;
esac

Here's an elaborated example how to start a vnc server using an init script.

answered Dec 7, 2011 at 16:11

tohuwawohu

1,1522 gold badges10 silver badges19 bronze badges

Thanks a lot tohuwawohu. This helped me to find errors in my script. I'll post it as another answer in about 8 hours, because my reputation doesn't allow me to do it just now (darn it).

mmm
– mmm

2011-12-07 17:00:24 +00:00
Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 17:00

Add a comment |

mmm · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 11:37:19Z

OK, I got it. The problem was:

Running my script as root, which normally would happen, won't work. That's why it's necessary to use su [my_user] -c
One needs to use quotation marks for the options, ie.

su my_user -c "/usr/bin/vncserver -geometry 1280x1024 -depth 16"
I also added . /lib/lsb/init-functions and exit 0 - don't know if those are necessary, but for sure they don't do any harm. Just copied those from the elaborate example provided by tohuwawohu.

So I ended up with:

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          startVNC
# Required-Start:    $remote_fs $syslog
# Required-Stop:     $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      
# Short-Description: Start VNC server at boot time
# Description:       A sophisticated script to do the job.
### END INIT INFO

#!/bin/sh
echo "JOB RUN AT $(date)"
echo "============================"
echo ""

. /lib/lsb/init-functions
su my_user -c "/usr/bin/vncserver -geometry 1280x1024 -depth 16"

exit 0

Which works just fine. Of course, using the above cited elaborate script might be even better. I added the script to start-up via:

sudo update-rc.d -f startVNC start 99 2 3 4 5 .

because I don't see any reason to run anything on shutdown (beyond logging, which I'm not doing).

Also see the comment about the shebang (the line that starts #!) being misplaced here under my original question. It works, though, so I didn't want to include untested code here. You should change it probably if you'd like to use it.

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